RALPH:  The first sinner described here was a common villain in Shakespeare's day. He's a farmer who hoarded grain in order to sell it later, when prices went up. But when prices go down instead, he goes bankrupt and hangs himself in despair.

DAVINA:  In Shakespeare's time, just as today, people despised businessmen who tried to profit from difficult times.  A farmer who hoards grain is keeping it from the people who need it to eat. But there's another reason why this farmer has been condemned to hell. In committing suicide, he has violated the 6th commandment: Thou shall not kill.

RALPH:  The third sinner was an equally common scoundrel: a merchant who cheats his customers – in this case, a tailor who charges for more fabric than he actually uses in making a pair of stockings.

DAVINA:  But it's the second sinner, the equivocator, who is the most interesting. No one watching the play in 1606 would have had any doubt as to who this sinner was meant to represent.

RALPH:  Imagine if the U.S. government had announced that it had prevented a major terrorist attack. Hours before the president was to give his state of the union address, a bomb was discovered in the capitol building. 

DAVINA:  The year before Macbeth was written, that’s essentially what happened in England. Catholic militants had planted 36 tons of gunpowder in the basement of Westminster Palace on the eve of the opening of Parliament. 

RALPH:  King James, all of his court, and every member of Parliament would have been annihilated had the explosives been set off.

DAVINA:  The militants’ aim was to pave the way for an invasion of England by Catholic countries such as France and Spain.

RALPH:  In a famous trial, the top Jesuit priest in England, Father Henry Garnet, was accused of being complicit in the plot.

DAVINA:  Lying under oath was a mortal sin, but the Catholic Church had formulated an elaborate set of guidelines allowing priests to mislead the authorities without technically committing a sin. 

RALPH:  According to the porter, the equivocator could "swear one scale against another”; that is, he could answer both "yes" and "no" to the same question while under oath. 

DAVINA:  Debate over this technique of "equivocation" was the main point of contention in Garnet's trial.

RALPH:  Garnet argued that as long as God knew what he meant, even if the jury had been deceived, he had neither sinned nor committed perjury.

DAVINA:  Like the judges in the case, the porter does not buy Garnet's argument. As he puts it, Garnet "committed treason enough for God's sake ... he could not equivocate to heaven.”

RALPH:  Interestingly, the play itself is full of these kinds of equivocations:  fair is foul, and foul is fair, for example. By the time we get to the end of the story, Macbeth will refer to the witches as ‘equivocating fiends who lie like the truth’.