SOURCE: Gossman, Ann. “On the Knocking at the Gate in ‘Markheim.’” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 17, no. 1 (June 1962): 73–6.

In the following essay, Gossman discusses the influence of Shakespeare's Macbeth on Stevenson's “Markheim.”

In defense of the revealing small incident in fiction, Stevenson writes: “This, then, is the plastic part of literature: to embody character, though, or emotion in some act or attitude that shall be remarkably striking to the mind's eye.”¹ This paper will seek to demonstrate that in “Markheim” Stevenson uses the act of knocking at the door to achieve those emotional effects that De Quincey ascribes to the knocking at the gate in Macbeth. Some of the images in “Markheim” recall images in Macbeth. What I would suggest, then, is that both the play and De Quincey's theorizing about it may have influenced Stevenson's imagination when he sought to convey the state of mind of his murderer.

Stevenson's story...