On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth
"On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth" is an essay in Shakespearean criticism by the English author Thomas De Quincey, first published in the October 1823 edition of The London Magazine.[2]: 356 The writer admits to being perplexed since childhood by the knocking at the gate in Act II of Macbeth after King Duncan is killed.The writer describes someone stirring from a fainting spell as the most affecting moment in the ordeal, because onlookers are assured of the recommencement of a life that was suspended.It signals "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".[8] De Quincey also views his responses to the play in reference to another of his classic essays, "On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts".