I received a very interesting comment to my December 18 post which asked whether George Kittredge's theory regarding dramatic necessity being the reason for the creation of the Porter gave enough credit to the actors that Shakespeare was working with - particularly, in this case, the comic actors Will Kempe and Robert Armin - for inspiring characters such as this one. After all, he had to provide them with work. I would definitely agree (in fact, in my post of December 10, I compared Shakespeare to Duke Ellington in this regard), and as I was re-reading Frank Kermode's The Age of Shakespeare (2004), I found that one of the greatest literary scholars of the last fifty or so years is also on this side of the argument. In the chapter on the Globe, he states that there is "no doubt that Shakespeare wrote with particular members of the company in mind", and for proof, he contrasts the earlier comic roles written for Kempe, with the more sophisticated ones (such as Feste in Twelfth Night and the Fool in King Lear) that were written for Armin, a more subtle actor in Kermode's opinion: "It is fair to say that if Armin had not joined the company these roles might not exist in the forms familiar to us". And I think it's fair to say that we owe both of these actors a round of applause.

George Kittredge, the great Shakespeare scholar from Boston, in writing on Macbeth, gave all the credit for the existence of the Porter to the requirements that Shakespeare needed to fulfill at that particular point in the play: He needed a character to fill a period of time between the murder and the re-entry of the cleaned-up Macbeths, but it couldn't be a major character and it couldn't advance the story. The play also needed relief from the "extreme tensions" of the bloody regicide and the discovery of the body by Macduff et al, and the type of relief had to be of a dark comic variety. Thus the Porter was born. It's an intriguing theory - as it shows how Shakespeare's understanding of what the audience would need at a given point may have been crucial to the creation of some of his great minor characters. Others of this type that come immediately to mind: the Apothecary in Romeo and Juliet, the Gravediggers in Hamlet, the Clown (carrying the asp and figs) in Antony and Cleopatra, and the Gardener in Richard II. If the theory is true, and necessity was integral to their development, it shows once more Shakespeare's unparalleled emphasis on detail: even the smallest characters in the plays are fascinating and believable.