In three of Shakespeare’s four great tragedies – Macbeth, Hamlet, and Othello – alcohol is present at key moments, not as a social, but rather a tragic, lubricant, and in King Lear it is referred to pointedly by the villain and the Fool. Aside from brief instances of mirthless carousing, the pleasures of alcohol are absent from these plays, and instead it is associated with villainy, danger, and death. And the villains themselves, knowing what they are about, rarely touch the stuff.
Macbeth
The Porter in Macbeth is often called drunken but it might be more accurate to describe him as hungover, woken by the knocking of Macduff and Lennox, having ‘carous[ed] till the second cock’ (II. iii. 18), that is until 3 a.m. On his way to answer the knocking he plays out a macabre fantasy of himself as porter of the gates of hell, concluding that all types of people ‘go the primrose way to th’everlasting bonfire’ (II. iii. 14). This concise description of the tragedy of the Macbeths is followed fluently, or fluidly, by his famous statement to Macduff of the three things provoked by drink: ‘Marry, sir, nose-painting, sleep and urine. Lechery, sir, it provokes and unprovokes’ (II. iii. 21–22). (John’s got brewer’s droop – he has no spur to provoke the prick of his intent. For Harold Bloom’s speculation that Macbeth is impotent, see The Invention of the Human, p. 528.) Nose-painting is a red nose, sleep in this play, strongly associated with death – ‘The sleeping and the dead’ (II. ii. 63) – is a vulnerability and then an impossibility, and as the son of a leather worker Shakespeare would have known that the piss artist pisseth most.
By the time of the Porter scene the regicide has already occurred, led by Lady Macbeth and lubricated by alcohol. The plan that she initially explains to her husband is that she will knock out Duncan’s chamberlains ‘with wine and wassail’ (I. vii. 70), ‘wassail’ being revelry or carousing, ironic in a play that contains none. Later she implies something stronger, which threatens to poison them, saying ‘I have drugged their possets, / That death and nature do contend about them’ (II. ii. 6–7), a posset being ‘A drink made from hot milk curdled with ale, wine, or other liquor’ (OED).
There is something interesting going on here to do with that whitish fluid antithetical to a play of darkness and death, namely milk. Worrying about her husband’s potency, Lady Macbeth says that he is ‘too full o’th’milk of human kindness’ (I. v. 12), and later in the same scene makes her request to the minsters of hell that they ‘unsex me here […] And take my milk for gall’ (I. v. 39–46). Finally, in her most overt indictment of Macbeth’s manhood, she says,
I have given suck, and know How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me: I would, while it was smiling in my face, Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums, And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn As you have done to this. (I. vii. 58–63)
In this play milk connotes weakness, would be denied a baby, and is replaced by poison and curdled into alcohol, itself an instrument used by the villains to lubricate their way to the everlasting bonfire.
Hamlet
This last point is also true of Hamlet, in which the Prince introduces a similar vocabulary of drinking and, because he is talking about Claudius, does so with contempt:
