ABSTRACT
Presumably Robert Armin, who had succeeded Will Kempe as the Clown of Shakespeare's company, introduced the Porter to Jacobean audiences as the knocking at the gate took place at Inverness Castle when the King's Men first performed The Tragedy of Macbeth at the Globe playhouse. If a man were porter of Hell Gate, he should have old turning the key. Hell from time immemorial has had an entrance gate. But Hell has a folk iconography familiar enough since the Middle Ages even to nonliterary types such as the Porter. The sundry damned callers who knock on Hell Gate as imagined by the Porter have, to be sure, drawn ample commentary. The great and forbidding pit of the lower Hell is associated with fire, boiling ponds, serpents, and devils with pitchforks. Modern poet Robert Frost required only nine lines to have his say about Fire and Ice: "Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice.
