A note on method and
fidelity. The essay is short, about four pages in its first
printing, and modern editions paragraph it differently. I therefore treat it as
seven logically distinct movements, in De Quincey's order, rather than by an
editor's paragraph numbers. I quote only brief phrases I am confident of, and
these should be checked against a scholarly edition (e.g. Grevel Lindop's Works
of Thomas De Quincey, 2000–03, or Masson's 1889–90 Collected Writings).
I distinguish De Quincey's claims, textual evidence from Macbeth,
historical fact, later scholarship and my own assessment
wherever the difference matters.
I. Context
1. Biographical and
intellectual formation
Thomas De Quincey
(1785–1859) was born in Manchester, the son of a merchant, and was a precocious
classicist. He read Greek fluently in boyhood and received a formidable
education, notably at Manchester Grammar School. In 1802 he ran away, wandered
in Wales and then lived in destitution in London. He later transformed this
period into the central episode of the Confessions, including the figure
of the young prostitute Ann. He entered Worcester College, Oxford, in 1803 and
left in 1808 without taking a degree. He had begun taking opium (as laudanum)
by about 1804, initially for neuralgic pain, and became dependent on it. These
facts matter to the essay because the faculties it prizes are the ones his own
life taxed: dream, suspended time, involuntary memory and states in which, as
he later put it, a single moment can be dilated.
His literary formation
was thoroughly Romantic. He admired Wordsworth's poetry before he knew him and
met Coleridge in 1807. By 1809 he had taken over Dove Cottage in Grasmere from
Wordsworth, who had moved to Allan Bank, and he lived in the Lake District,
within the Wordsworth–Coleridge–Southey orbit, for many years. He read German
philosophy and criticism with real, if sometimes shaky, understanding. His Kant
was often second-hand and impatient, but his Schiller, Jean Paul Richter and
the Schlegels were closely read. His intellectual temperament was digressive,
associative and self-dramatising. He disliked systematic argument and preferred
what he called "impassioned prose".
2. Shakespeare and
Romantic criticism
By 1823 the Romantic
Shakespeare was already formed. Samuel Johnson's Preface (1765) and
eighteenth-century character criticism (Maurice Morgann on Falstaff, 1777) had
prepared the way. Coleridge's lectures (1808–19), A. W. Schlegel's Lectures
on Dramatic Art and Literature (English translation 1815), Hazlitt's Characters
of Shakespear's Plays (1817) and Lamb's essay "On the Tragedies of
Shakspeare" (1811) shifted attention from neoclassical rules to organic
unity, interiority and imaginative response. Three Romantic emphases are
directly pertinent here:
- Organic form.
Schlegel and Coleridge held that Shakespeare's apparent irregularities
served a deeper design. The essay's closing claim (that nothing in
Shakespeare is "useless or inert") is this doctrine at its most
emphatic.
- Psychological, not merely moral,
response. Hazlitt's Macbeth chapter,
for example, dwells on the imaginative momentum of the play and on
Macbeth's imaginative sensitivity.
- The inner theatre.
Lamb notoriously argued that Shakespeare's greatest effects are lost on
the stage. De Quincey's essay moves between reading and playgoing and
offers a different account of what the theatre can do, though it is not
itself a theatre review.
Historical fact. The
stage tradition behind De Quincey was that of the Kemble–Siddons era (Sarah
Siddons was celebrated as Lady Macbeth, retiring from the part in 1812) and the
Kean period. Davenant's Restoration adaptation had long shaped stage versions,
and fuller Shakespearean text was restored only gradually. I have not found
evidence that De Quincey is describing a particular production; his appeal is
to a repeated childhood response, and the essay's drama is largely an inner
one.
3. Aesthetics: the
sublime, terror, the Gothic
Edmund Burke's Philosophical
Enquiry (1757) defined the sublime through terror, obscurity, power and
astonishment, "the state of the soul, in which all its motions are
suspended". The phrase anticipates De Quincey's "suspension".
Kant's Critique of Judgement (1790) distinguished the mathematical and
dynamical sublime and located sublimity in the mind's recognition of its own
supersensible vocation rather than in the object. De Quincey's mixture of
Burkean sensation and quasi-Kantian faculty-language is typical of English
Romantic prose.
The Gothic supplies the
immediate cultural climate: Walpole, Radcliffe, Lewis, Maturin's Melmoth the
Wanderer (1820), and the sensationalism of Blackwood's Magazine. Ann
Radcliffe's posthumous essay "On the Supernatural in Poetry" (1826)
distinguished terror, which expands the soul, from horror, which freezes it. De
Quincey's "horror" in the essay is not quite Radcliffe's: for him it
is a state of suspended sympathy, achieved, as we shall see, through a total
sympathy with the murderer. Meanwhile the Aristotelian apparatus of pity and
fear is never named in the essay but is plainly being revised. The essay
suggests that the principal emotion in Macbeth at the crucial moment is
neither pity for Duncan nor fear for ourselves but a dread suspension that only
a return of the ordinary can end.
4. The literature of
knowledge and the literature of power: a necessary chronological caution
The distinction is not in
the 1823 essay. De Quincey formulated it in the later essay on "The Poetry
of Pope" (North British Review, August 1848), revised in his
collected edition. There he divides literature into the literature of
knowledge, whose function is to teach, and the literature of power, whose
function is to move: "the function of the second is to move".
The first is superseded by better knowledge; the second does not become
obsolete, because it works on the reader's faculties rather than informing
them.
Assessment. Applying
this distinction to the 1823 essay is legitimate as retrospective
interpretation but not as a description of what De Quincey wrote in 1823. What
the essay does contain is its germ. The "understanding" of the second
movement is the faculty of the literature of knowledge. The "feelings of
the heart", which the essay treats as the judge of what Shakespeare is
doing, belong to the literature of power. I shall flag where the later
vocabulary illuminates the earlier text.
II. Composition and
publication
The essay appeared in the
London Magazine for October 1823 (vol. 8), over the signature
"X.Y.Z." The London Magazine, under its publishers Taylor
& Hessey, was then the most brilliant literary monthly in England,
publishing Lamb ("Elia"), Hazlitt, Hood, Clare and Keats's circle.
Its founding editor John Scott had been killed in a duel in 1821; De Quincey's
famous Confessions of an English Opium-Eater had appeared in the
magazine in September and October 1821. He wrote for it through 1823–24 in a
state of perennial financial pressure. The Knocking essay belongs to this
period, along with other pieces of 1823 such as the Letters to a Young Man
whose Education has been Neglected.
Later editions.
De Quincey reprinted much of his periodical work in the Edinburgh edition Selections
Grave and Gay (1853–60). The Knocking essay, which was short and never
really disappeared, was repeatedly included in collected editions: David
Masson's Collected Writings (1889–90), where it belongs among the
miscellaneous essays, and the Lindop edition. I know of no substantive revision
of the essay itself. The significant revision concerns its material. In
"On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts" (Blackwood's,
1827), De Quincey turned the Williams murders into a satirical mock-treatise
on the aesthetics of murder, and in a "Postscript" (1854) he
recounted the Ratcliffe Highway killings in full narrative detail. The 1823
essay is thus the seed of a longer cycle. Its tone is serious, and its jokes
are brief and sharp.
Position in the
Shakespeare corpus. De Quincey's other substantial
Shakespeare work is the long biographical-critical article
"Shakspeare" for the Encyclopaedia Britannica (written in the
late 1830s), together with scattered remarks on Hamlet, Lear and the poet's
reputation. The Knocking essay is far shorter than these, but it is the single
best-known piece of De Quincey on Shakespeare, and it is the one that exhibits
his characteristic method most purely.
III. The essay, movement
by movement
Movement 1: The childhood
perplexity
What De Quincey says.
Since boyhood, he reports, he has been puzzled by one effect in Macbeth:
the knocking at the gate that follows the murder of Duncan produced in him a
feeling for which he could not account, an effect of peculiar awfulness and
solemnity reflected back on the murder. His own reasoning suggested that the
knocking ought to have no such effect.
Analysis.
The essay opens not with an argument but with a symptom. De Quincey
states a datum of experience, the persistent effect of a stage noise, and then
an anomaly: the effect exceeds what reason can explain. This structure matters
for three reasons.
First, it fixes the
evidential basis of the whole essay. The ground of the claim is not a text but
a response, the experience of the reader or spectator. Romantic
criticism characteristically begins here (Coleridge and Hazlitt do likewise),
but De Quincey is unusually explicit that the response precedes and
constrains the interpretation.
Second, the
autobiographical frame gives the response duration. A childhood impression that
survives and demands explanation is typical of Wordsworthian and De Quinceyan
memory, in which early impressions are not lost but wait to be understood. It
also lends the argument a quasi-detective form: an unexplained effect, a
hypothesis, a confirming event.
Third, the choice of
object is acute. The knocking is not a "great speech". It is the
humblest sound in the play, a noise off-stage. The essay thus implicitly argues
that the secret of Shakespeare's power lies in the smallest effects and not in
the grandest lines.
Textual evidence. In
the Folio the knocking begins in 2.2, as Macbeth returns from the chamber with
the daggers and blood on his hands. Lady Macbeth hears it ("I hear a
knocking / At the south entry"), Macbeth cries "Whence is that
knocking? / How is't with me, when every noise appals me?", and the scene
ends with "Wake Duncan with thy knocking! I would thou couldst!" The
knocking recurs insistently in 2.3 through the Porter's speech. De Quincey's
phrasing ("succeeds to the murder") is accurate.
Movement 2: The
exhortation on the understanding
What De Quincey says. He
then digresses to address the reader directly: one should never defer to the
understanding when it conflicts with any other faculty of the mind. The
understanding, though useful and indispensable, is the meanest faculty of the
human mind and the one most to be distrusted. When it and the feelings of the
heart collide, the heart will prove right. Most people trust nothing else,
which may serve in ordinary life, but not for philosophical purposes.
Analysis. This
is the theoretical hinge of the essay. It is also the passage most visibly of
its moment: Coleridge's distinction between Understanding and Reason,
Wordsworth's celebration of "feeling" and the whole Romantic reaction
against the Enlightenment's analytic ideal stand behind it. In the
German-influenced vocabulary of the period, Verstand (understanding) is
discursive and calculating, while Vernunft (reason) or imagination
grasps wholes. De Quincey reduces this to a rhetorical antithesis,
understanding versus feelings of the heart.
Three observations.
(a) The argument is a
priority claim about evidence. The experience of the knocking is treated as
data that any adequate theory must explain, not as an error that rational
analysis should dissolve. The anomaly is not that the response is wrong but
that the theory is inadequate. This is a sound scientific instinct
dressed as a moral exhortation.
(b) The rhetoric is
performative. De Quincey's imperatives ("never pay any
attention...") flatter and instruct the reader simultaneously, and they
establish the authority of his own critical practice before it has been
exercised. The digression is also a classic De Quinceyan manoeuvre, an
interruption that appears to delay the argument but actually constructs the
epistemological ground on which it rests.
(c) It anticipates the
literature of knowledge and the literature of power. The
"understanding" here is the faculty to which the literature of
knowledge addresses itself, the "feelings" that to which the
literature of power appeals. Shakespeare is thus placed from the start in the
second category: his effects are to be judged by what they do to the whole mind
and not by what they can be shown to mean.
Limitation. The
opposition is a little too tidy. De Quincey's own explanation, when it comes,
is a triumph of the understanding: a careful argument from the nature of
murder. The essay does not abandon reason; it uses reason in the service of a
response it first obtained by feeling. The rhetorical hostility to the
understanding obscures this.
Movement 3: The Williams
murders and the comic turn
What De Quincey says. The
solution, he says, came through a quite different experience. In 1812 (the
murders in fact occurred in December 1811) a man named Williams "made his
début" in the Ratcliffe Highway by murdering two households, and so
established a standard by which all subsequent murders are measured. De Quincey
adds, in mock-connoisseur tones, that these murders have made the amateur of
murder fastidious: everything since pales beside them, though it is
unreasonable to expect every man to be a great artist or to have the genius of
Mr Williams.
Analysis.
The tone changes abruptly, and the shift is deliberate and crucial.
Historical fact. John
Williams was suspected of murdering the Marr family (a linen-draper's
household) and, twelve days later, the Williamson family at the King's Arms in
Wapping, in December 1811. He was arrested, and he hanged himself in prison
before trial. The murders produced a nationwide panic, a prolonged and legally
dubious investigation, and a long afterlife in popular print. De Quincey was in
the Lake District at the time, and the case entered his imagination through
press accounts.
The irony. The
language of connoisseurship ("début", "artist",
"genius", "the stage of Ratcliffe Highway") applies the
vocabulary of theatrical criticism to a real atrocity. This has two effects.
First, it is darkly comic: an aesthetics of murder in which the amateur
complains of the dearth of good new work. The comedy anticipates the 1827
satire, and it should not be underrated, because it demonstrates the detachment
that the essay later argues against. The connoisseur's cool perspective is the
perspective of the understanding that regards a murder as an object. Second,
and more subtly, the passage prepares the argument by making murder available
for aesthetic analysis at all. In the next movement De Quincey will ask what
the poet must do to make murder dramatically significant. The joke is the
doorway through which the essay passes from the childhood puzzle to the theory.
Assessment. There
is an ethical risk here that De Quincey knows and exploits. The flippancy about
real victims is offensive, and the essay's own later argument, that the victim's
experience is unavailable to art, gives the offence a theoretical alibi without
wholly removing it. Many readers have found the Ratcliffe Highway frame the
least defensible element of the piece; others, from Wilde onwards, have found
in it a seed of modern aestheticism.
Movement 4: The murderer
as the centre of sympathy
What De Quincey says. The
Williams case, he explains, taught him the key principle. In an ordinary murder
the sympathy is wholly directed to the victim, and the incident is one of
coarse and vulgar horror. The murdered person, overwhelmed by one panic, loses
all strife of thought and all "flux and reflux of passion and of
purpose"; the fear of instant death smites him "with its petrific
mace". But in the murderer, "such a murderer as a poet will
condescend to", there must be raging a great storm of passion (jealousy,
ambition, vengeance, hatred) which creates a hell within him, and into this
hell we are to look. Therefore the poet must throw the interest on the
murderer, and our sympathy must be with him. De Quincey then specifies the kind
of sympathy: not pity or approbation, but a "sympathy of
comprehension", an entering into his feelings so as to understand them.
Analysis.
This is the central, and most original, move.
The argument.
There are two linked claims. (i) Psychological: the victim's mind is, at
the crucial moment, annihilated by a single terror and therefore offers nothing
for the imagination to explore, while the murderer's mind is the field of
maximum intensity. (ii) Dramaturgical: since drama must hold the
audience's imaginative attention, the interest of a murder scene must lie in
the murderer. The word "condescend" is telling. It sets the poet's
standard (a murderer interesting enough for art) against the vulgar murderer of
a newspaper report, and by implication against the Gothic villain of mere
sensation.
The distinction of
sympathies. "A sympathy of comprehension"
is a notably precise formulation, and it deserves attention. It separates empathic
understanding from moral approval or compassion. This is a
genuine contribution to the theory of tragic response. It resolves the old
difficulty (raised since Aristotle) of how an audience can be absorbed in a
criminal protagonist without endorsing him. The audience's engagement is
cognitive-imaginative, an entry into the inner storm, and not a verdict. It is
consonant with Coleridge's remark that Shakespeare makes us see through the
eyes of every character, and with Keats's "negative capability".
The phrase "petrific
mace". The language of the victim's terror is
Miltonic and deliberately so. Milton's Death shakes "his mace petrific,
cold and dry" (Paradise Lost, X). The allusion places the victim's
state at the level of cosmic myth, but also reduces it: it is a
stillness, a freezing, not a drama. The rhetoric thus performs the argument:
the victim's mind is turned to stone, and the murderer's mind is the only one
left in motion.
Limitations. The
claim that the victim's experience is wholly crushed into a single panic is an
assertion, not an observation; Shakespeare himself, in the murder of Banquo's
son or of Lady Macduff's, makes the victims dramatically vivid. Macbeth
is also unusual in that Duncan's murder occurs off-stage, so that the audience
has no direct access to the victim anyway. De Quincey's theory fits the
specific case better than it generalises. Still, it explains the specific case
remarkably well.
Movement 5: The two
murderers and the "fiendish nature"
What De Quincey says.
In Macbeth, he continues, Shakespeare has introduced two murderers, a
husband and wife, and, as usual, he has discriminated them sharply. Macbeth's
strife of mind is greater than his wife's; the "tiger spirit" is less
awake in him, and his feelings are caught largely by contagion from her. But
since both are finally involved in the guilt of murder, the murderous mind must
be presumed in both. This had to be expressed, and to make the fiendish state a
proportionate antagonist to the unoffending nature of the deed, the poet needed
to show that human nature, the divine nature of love and mercy spread through
all creatures and seldom wholly withdrawn from man, had vanished, and that the
fiendish nature had taken its place. This is expressed by a "deep dead
stillness".
Analysis.
Here the argument moves from general theory to the play, and several textual
details deserve scrutiny.
Characterisation. De
Quincey's contrast is a legitimate reading and was widely shared: Macbeth
hesitates, imagines, suffers; Lady Macbeth drives, unsexes herself ("unsex
me here"), and calls for "thick night". The
"contagion" claim (that Macbeth's murderous resolve is largely caught
from her) sits uneasily beside the earlier scenes, where the "horrid
image" of murder arises in Macbeth's own mind before she appears (1.3),
and Lady Macbeth herself fears that his nature is "too full o' the milk of
human kindness". But De Quincey's emphasis falls on the contagion
of the deed, and it is defensible as an account of the sequence: she
supplies the nerve, he supplies the knife. Later criticism, especially
psychoanalytic, would explore the pair as a single divided psyche, a line that
De Quincey's "two murderers" gestures towards without developing.
Theological vocabulary. "The
divine nature of love and mercy" and the "fiendish nature" are
strong terms. They reflect De Quincey's Christian-Platonist inheritance and a
Romantic anthropology in which a divine element is common to humanity. The
murder expels that element. This agrees with the play's own diction: the
language of Macbeth and his wife is saturated with the vocabulary of angels,
devils, heaven and hell ("the deep damnation of his taking-off";
"Hell is murky"). The claim that Shakespeare needs to show a complete
eclipse of the human so as to match the enormity of regicide is a sophisticated
reading of proportion: the horror of the deed requires a matching depth
of inner transformation.
"Deep dead
stillness". This is the principal image of the
passage and the real object of De Quincey's analysis. It states that the poet
must express the murder not by action or noise but by a suspension. The
phrase also gives us the first version of what will be the essay's governing
figure: the murder as a "parenthesis" in the ordinary world. In the
same stretch of the argument De Quincey says that the murderers must be
"insulated", cut off by an immeasurable gulf from the ordinary tide
of human affairs, locked up in some deep recess, with the world of ordinary
life suddenly arrested, "laid asleep—tranced—racked into a dread
armistice", time annihilated and relation to things without abolished, all
passing self-withdrawn into "a deep syncope and suspension of earthly
passion". These are not mere ornament. They name the effects that the poet
must produce: insulation, arrest, annihilation of time, abolition
of external relation.
Textual evidence.
The play does produce exactly these effects in 2.1–2.2. The air of the scene is
hushed and charged ("Now o'er the one half-world / Nature seems
dead"; the wolf's howl; Tarquin's ravishing strides). Macbeth's own
language refuses the world: "the bell invites me"; "Hear it not,
Duncan". After the murder the exchanges between husband and wife become
broken, repetitive, nearly stichomythic ("I have done the deed. Didst thou
not hear a noise?" / "I heard the owl scream and the crickets cry.
Did not you speak?" / "When?" / "Now." / "As I
descended?"). The rhythm is that of two people communicating across a
gulf, and it produces the "stillness" De Quincey describes.
Assessment.
This is where De Quincey's method is most impressive. A criticism that reads
the dramatic effect of a scene as the product of specific inner states,
and then asks what the language and structure must do to convey them, is closer
to modern theatre analysis than to the character studies of the period.
Movement 6: The knocking
resolved
What De Quincey says. Hence,
he concludes, when the deed is done and "the work of darkness is
perfect", the world of darkness passes away like a pageantry in the
clouds. The knocking at the gate is heard; it makes known audibly that the
reaction has commenced. The human has made its reflux upon the fiendish; the
pulses of life are beginning to beat again; and the re-establishment of the
goings-on of the world in which we live first makes us profoundly sensible of
"the awful parenthesis" that had suspended them.
Analysis. This
is the solution to the puzzle posed in the first movement, and it is a model of
compression.
The mechanism.
The knocking breaks the suspension, and it is only by the break that the
suspension becomes perceptible. We cannot register a stillness while we are in
it, since it is a condition and not an object, but we register it at the moment
it ends. The knocking is therefore the retrospective guarantee of the horror.
It "reflects back" upon the murder the awfulness that the earlier
scene created but could not itself feel. This explains the original anomaly:
the knocking has no intrinsic power, and its power is relational. It
acts by contrast, as the first sound of the ordinary world after the abolition
of the ordinary world.
Time. The
idea of a "parenthesis" is the essay's most important contribution to
the theory of dramatic time. A parenthesis is a syntactic interruption that
suspends the main clause, and De Quincey figures the murder as a grammatical
suspension of the world's discourse. The temporal vocabulary ("time must
be annihilated"; "reflux"; "pulses of life beginning to
beat again") makes the knocking the resumption of clock time after
a stretch of non-time. This is a strikingly modern perception of how a stage
scene can create its own temporality, and it is consistent with the play's own
preoccupation with time ("To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow";
"Time and the hour runs through the roughest day").
Horror to ordinary
reality. The movement the user's brief asks about, from horror
to ordinary human reality, is therefore not a relief from the horror but
its completion. The ordinary is horrifying in context: the knocking is
mundane (someone wants to be let in), and its mundanity measures the abyss.
This anticipates a long modernist tradition, from Dostoevsky's use of the banal
at moments of crime to the "ordinary" noises that puncture the
uncanny in later fiction.
Terror, pity, catharsis.
The passage implies a revision of the Aristotelian scheme. The audience
undergoes not pity for Duncan but a sympathetic entrapment in the
murderers' suspended state, and the "reflux" provides release. This
has something in common with catharsis, but it is a catharsis of suspension
and not of purgation: the audience does not purge pity and fear, it is returned
to the world. The pity that the essay's account of the murder had set aside
returns by implication, since the re-entry of the human restores the capacity
to feel for the victim.
Movement 7: The
apostrophe to Shakespeare
What De Quincey says. "O
mighty poet!" he exclaims. Shakespeare's works are not simply and merely
great works of art; they are also like the phenomena of nature, like the sun
and the sea, the stars and the flowers, like frost and snow, rain and dew,
hail-storm and thunder. They are to be studied with entire submission of our
own faculties and in the perfect faith that in them there can be no too much or
too little, nothing useless or inert, and that the further we press our
discoveries the more we shall see proofs of design and self-supporting
arrangement where the careless eye had seen nothing but accident.
Analysis.
The closing apostrophe converts the particular discovery into a principle of
interpretation, and does so in the grand style.
Organicism. The
comparison with nature is the Romantic organic analogy in full: the work is a
living whole, not a mechanism or an artefact assembled by rules. The claim that
"the careless eye" sees accident where the attentive one sees design
is a methodological directive. It tells the critic to assume purposiveness and
to treat apparent flaws as unrecognised functions. The knocking, a detail that
critics had perhaps considered trivial or merely theatrical, has now been shown
to be structural.
Submission of faculties. "Entire
submission" is rhetorically extreme, and it marks the essay's limit as
well as its strength. It enjoins a critical posture of reverence that can shade
into bardolatry and disables the critic's ability to say that Shakespeare
nodded. Johnson had done exactly that, and De Quincey's principle is
deliberately anti-Johnsonian.
Assessment. The
apostrophe is both a conclusion and a performance. It enacts the sublime
response it describes (awe before a power that exceeds comprehension) and so
brings the reader into the same relation to Shakespeare that the essay claims
Shakespeare establishes with his audience. The essay thus ends by demonstrating
its own thesis that the literature of power moves its readers.
IV. The essay and the
play: the dramatic moment
The moment under
discussion is the transition between 2.2 and 2.3 of Macbeth: Macbeth has
murdered the sleeping Duncan offstage; the knocking begins; Lady Macbeth takes
the daggers back and returns with "My hands are of your colour; but I
shame / To wear a heart so white"; they withdraw; the knocking continues;
and the Porter enters.
What De Quincey
illuminates.
- Rhythm and silence.
Shakespeare slows the verse into short, fragmentary lines and then breaks
it with a non-verbal sound. De Quincey is right that the effect is
rhythmic and temporal.
- Staging.
The Folio's "Knock within" directions, repeated, make the sound
a structural element. The knocking begins during 2.2, so the
"suspension" is already ending as Macbeth is still stunned. This
slightly complicates De Quincey's tidy sequence (the deed done, then
the knocking). In the text the noise intrudes into the aftermath and so interrupts
the couple's attempt to compose themselves, which is dramatically richer.
- Language.
Macbeth's "Whence is that knocking? / How is't with me, when every
noise appals me?" shows the murderer's perspective on the
sound: for him it is a terror, not a release. De Quincey describes the
audience's reaction; the character's is the opposite. The knocking is
simultaneously the return of the world (for the audience) and the threat
of discovery (for Macbeth), and the power of the moment lies in that
disjunction.
- Atmosphere and architecture.
The knocking announces the structural turn from the night world of Act
2.1–2.2 to the daylight world of discovery in 2.3, from interior to
public, from private crime to political consequence.
What De Quincey omits.
He does not mention the Porter, who answers the knocking in the very
next speech with his drunken fantasy of being porter of hell-gate ("Here's
a knocking indeed! If a man were porter of hell-gate, he should have old
turning the key"). The omission is striking, since the Porter scene is the
standard locus of comic relief in the play, and the user's brief asks
about comic relief. De Quincey's account supplies a possible rationale without
naming it: the Porter's low comedy is the first fully "human"
register after the stillness, the world's pulses beating again at their most
ordinary, and the hell imagery returns the audience to the play's moral frame
with a grim joke. This reading is implicit in De Quincey; it is mine,
not his.
Later scholarship on the
Porter. Coleridge (in his 1810s lectures) judged the Porter's
speech un-Shakespearean and probably an interpolation for the groundlings; this
was a common Romantic view and one that De Quincey's silence may reflect.
Modern editors (for example Kenneth Muir in the Arden edition) largely accept
the Porter as Shakespeare's and read his allusions (to equivocation, to the
Gunpowder Plot trials, to the farmer who hanged himself) as topical Jacobean
material from around 1606. The Hecate material is the part of the play widely
attributed to Middleton. I regard the Porter scene as the best available test
of De Quincey's theory: his account explains the knocking, but a full
account of the passage must explain the comedy that the knocking introduces.
Thomas Mann and others have explored this tension.
V. Critical method:
originality and limits
Originality.
- Effect-first criticism.
He begins from a reader's affective response and works backwards to the
causal structure of the text that produced it. This anticipates
twentieth-century reader-response and affective stylistics.
- The theory of sympathy.
The "sympathy of comprehension" is a real conceptual advance.
- Dramatic time.
The "parenthesis" is a durable theatrical insight.
- The significance of the trivial.
A small, apparently incidental sound is shown to bear load. This is a
method of reading by the detail, which anticipates the New Critical
close reading by a century.
Limitations.
- Autobiographical evidence.
The argument rests on one reader's experience, and its generalisation to
all audiences is assumed, not shown.
- The Williams analogy is only partly
probative. A real murder and a stage murder
differ, and the move from the former to the latter is more suggestive than
demonstrative.
- Textual selectiveness.
The Porter is passed over, and the actual position of the knocking in the
sequence is slightly simplified.
- Rhetorical overreach.
The disparagement of the understanding is not borne out by his own
practice, and the closing "entire submission" is a doctrinal
rather than argumentative posture.
- Psychology without evidence.
The assertion that the victim's mind is wholly crushed is stated, not
argued.
Assessment.
These limits do not undermine the central insight but mark it as the work of an
essayist and not of a systematic critic. De Quincey is more a phenomenologist
of response than a theorist of drama.
VI. Conclusion
Central arguments
- A response to a particular dramatic
effect can be reliable evidence against a rationalist objection that it
should not occur.
- In tragedy the murderer, not the
victim, must be the focus of sympathy; this is a sympathy of
understanding, not of approval.
- The poet must therefore render the
murder as an insulated, time-annihilating suspension of the ordinary
world.
- The knocking, by re-introducing the
ordinary, makes that suspension perceptible and so completes the horror.
- Shakespeare's apparent accidents are
designs, and the critic must read accordingly.
Theoretical assumptions
Faculty psychology
(understanding versus feeling); organic form; a Christian-Platonic anthropology
in which "human nature" is the divine nature of love and mercy; and
the sublime as a state of suspended motion.
Distinctive contribution
A theory of how a
dramatic effect works through contrast, and of the temporal structure of tragic
horror. It also gives Shakespeare criticism a model of attention to the
smallest unit.
Influence and later
reception
Historical fact. The
essay has been almost continuously anthologised since the nineteenth century,
and its phrases (the "awful parenthesis", the "sympathy of
comprehension") recur in editors' notes and criticism. Later
scholarship: A. C. Bradley's Shakespearean Tragedy (1904) is the
great culmination of the character-centred tradition that De Quincey helped
form; G. Wilson Knight's essays on Macbeth in The Wheel of Fire
(1930) and The Imperial Theme (1931) offer an atmospheric and symbolic
reading of the play's darkness that is a distant cousin of De Quincey's
attention to mood; and Cleanth Brooks's "The Naked Babe and the Cloak of
Manliness" (1947) pursues imagery in a mode that owes De Quincey's close
attention something. I give these as lines of kinship, not documented debts,
since I cannot attest that each cites the essay. De Quincey's account of the
knocking is regularly quoted in stage histories and in programme notes.
Directors have also experimented with the knocking's sound as a means of
controlling tempo.
Objections and
alternative readings
- Coleridge's
doubt about the Porter scene, and modern defences of its comic and topical
function, show that the knocking's continuation cannot be ignored.
- Psychoanalytic
readings treat the knocking as the return of the repressed: the world's
claim on the transgressors.
- Historicist
readings, from the 1980s onwards, place the knocking and Porter within
Jacobean politics (regicide, the Gunpowder Plot, equivocation) and so
resist De Quincey's universal-psychological frame.
- Theatrical
criticism points out that the sound functions as a practical device for
covering the cross-stage movement and the actors' exits, which is a
mundane fact that sits alongside, not against, the symbolic reading.
- Ethical
objections attach to the Ratcliffe Highway frame.
Continuing relevance
The essay remains a
foundational text for theories of dramatic affect. It shows that tragic
emotion is produced by structure and contrast as much as by content, that
audiences can be implicated in perspectives they do not approve of, and that
time can be an expressive resource. Contemporary work in affect theory,
cognitive approaches to drama and sound studies can all find a precedent in the
essay's attention to how a single noise changes the whole meaning of what
precedes it.
The essay is more
persuasive about how the knocking feels than about why Shakespeare
wrote it, and it is best read as a theory of audience experience and not as
a claim about Shakespeare's intentions. As such it is nearly unmatched in
compactness. Its lasting lesson is that critical reasoning, properly used, is
not the enemy of feeling but its interpreter: De Quincey's own essay is the
proof that the understanding, once it consents to follow the heart, can explain
what it first could not.
