I’ve received a very good e-mail asking about the condemnation of the Jesuits and their practice of equivocation by the Porter in Macbeth. Here’s my response:

 

Like you, I was also a little disturbed by the Porter’s seemingly unequivocal condemnation of equivocation and of the Jesuits for practicing it. It does seem to grate with the Bard’s known Catholicism.
I see in this passage a desire by Shakespeare to distance himself from the Catholic hotheads, or what might now be called terrorists, who were arrested for the so-called Gunpowder Plot shortly before Shakespeare was writing Macbeth. Against this should be set the fact that the Porter is clearly a disreputable character in his own right, a drunk and a lecher, whose anti-Catholicism is a facet of his general cynicism.
As for Macbeth, as a whole, representing further evidence of the Bard’s Catholic faith, I refer you to my introduction to the play, which was published in the Ignatius Critical Edition of it.