[Footnote 243:  Cf.  Coleridge’s note on the Lady Macduff scene.]

[Footnote 244:  It is nothing to the purpose that Macduff himself says,

                             Sinful Macduff,

They were all struck for thee! naught that I am,
Not for their own demerits, but for mine,
Fell slaughter on their souls.

There is no reason to suppose that the sin and demerit he speaks of is that of leaving his home.  And even if it were, it is Macduff that speaks, not Shakespeare, any more than Shakespeare speaks in the preceding sentence,

Did heaven look on,
And would not take their part?

And yet Brandes (ii. 104) hears in these words ’the voice of revolt ... that sounds later through the despairing philosophy of King Lear.’  It sounds a good deal earlier too; e.g. in Tit.  And., IV. i. 81, and 2 Henry VI., II. i. 154.  The idea is a commonplace of Elizabethan tragedy.]

[Footnote 245:  And the idea that it was the death of his son Hamnet, aged eleven, that brought this power to maturity is one of the more plausible attempts to find in his dramas a reflection of his private history.  It implies however as late a date as 1596 for King John.]

[Footnote 246:  Even if this were true, the retort is obvious that neither is there anything resembling the murder-scene in Macbeth.]

[Footnote 247:  I have confined myself to the single aspect of this question on which I had what seemed something new to say.  Professor Hales’s defence of the passage on fuller grounds, in the admirable paper reprinted in his Notes and Essays on Shakespeare, seems to me quite conclusive.  I may add two notes. (1) The references in the Porter’s speeches to ‘equivocation,’ which have naturally, and probably rightly, been taken as allusions to the Jesuit Garnet’s appeal to the doctrine of equivocation in defence of his perjury when, on trial for participation in the Gunpowder Plot, do not stand alone in Macbeth.  The later prophecies of the Witches Macbeth calls ’the equivocation of the fiend That lies like truth’ (V. v. 43); and the Porter’s remarks about the equivocator who ’could swear in both the scales against either scale, who committed treason enough for God’s sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven,’ may be compared with the following dialogue (IV. ii. 45): 

     Son. What is a traitor?

     Lady Macduff. Why, one that swears and lies.

     Son. And be all traitors that do so?

     Lady Macduff. Everyone that does so is a traitor, and must
                        be hanged.

Garnet, as a matter of fact, was hanged in May, 1606; and it is to be feared that the audience applauded this passage.

(2) The Porter’s soliloquy on the different applicants for admittance has, in idea and manner, a marked resemblance to Pompey’s soliloquy on the inhabitants of the prison, in Measure for Measure, IV. iii. 1 ff.; and the dialogue between him and Abhorson on the ‘mystery’ of hanging (IV. ii. 22 ff.) is of just the same kind as the Porter’s dialogue with Macduff about drink.]