How does the comic banter of the porter (II/iii/lines 1-37) and the comic banter between Lady Macduff and Ross and her son (IV/ii/lines 1-61) enhance the plays theatricality and reinforce the central ideas of the play?

Shakespeare has included comic banter in the porter scene and Lady Macduff, Ross and her son’s scene in order to enhance the play’s theatricality through comic relief in between intense, suspenseful scenes and reinforce the central ideas of the play of evil and the supernatural, ambition, reality masked by appearances underlining the dissimulated society and inversion of values and desire and achievement.

The comic banter of the porter in Act 2 Scene 3, lines 1-37 produces comic relief and therefore enhances the plays theatricality and underlines the main ideas of the play by releasing the tension the audience has built up in the previous, contrastive scene. The change from high drama to low comedy creates black humour and irony through the metaphor “porter of hell-gate” given the recent horrific events within the castle. Moreover, the imagery of ‘hell’ is continued in the porter’s prose: “Who’s there I’th’name of Beelzebub?” the analogy hell becomes imperturbably strongly as instead of receiving a welcome to Macbeth’s castle, guests are cautioned as they put themselves in the devil’s land. The porter is unlike all the characters of noble birth and this is portrayed through his speech in prose and not iambic verse. Despite his casual banter, the porter ironically tells truths, therefore, increasing the sense of theatricality. The comical metaphor of naming the alcohol the equivocator to lechery because alcohol both “provokes, and unprovokes” caricatures Macbeth’s moral confusion and ambition for power. By doing so the porter echoes Lady Macbeth’s sexual taunting of Macbeth about his ability to carry out resolutions. The oxymoron “too cold for