Talking of comic moments after dramatic highs, I was watching a documentary about Shakespeare and the Jacobean regime which included a brilliant rendition of the Porter's scene from Macbeth from a recent RSC production. Taking the line "if a man were porter of hellgate" literally, they made him the Devil, dressed as a suicide bomber - a reference to the Gunpowder Plot, because "here's an equivocator that could swear in both the scales against either scale, who committed treason enough for God's sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven" is thought to be an allusion to the case of the priest Henry Garnet, who wrote A Treatise of Equivocation and was executed for his knowledge of the plot.
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