SOURCE: Thatcher, David. “Cover-up: The Murder of Gloucester in 2 Henry VI.” The Shakespeare Newsletter 50, no. 4 (winter 2000-2001): 105, 114, 116, 118.

[In the following essay, Thatcher lists the five different ways in which murders and the cover-ups that follow them are committed in Shakespeare's plays, and shows how Humphrey of Gloucester's murder in Henry VI, Part 2 is an example of a murder made to look as though it were a death by natural causes.]

In Holinshed's version of the Macbeth story, the deceitful Macbeth figure, Donwald, instructs four servants to cut the king's throat while he is sleeping. To prevent the body from betraying him by bleeding in his presence, Donwald orders the four murderers to deflect the course of a small river, dig a hole in the riverbed, bury the body, and, by allowing the river to resume its course, conceal, probably for ever, all traces of the crime.¹

Shakespeare wisely dispenses with this macabre narrative: representing it on stage would have been cumbersome, and reporting it might have risked unwanted laughter. I quote it here because it is an example, appallingly literal, of a theme which Shakespeare deals with frequently in his murder cases, the theme of cover-up.

The simulations and dissimulations Shakespeare's murderers resort to can be divided into five distinct main groups, though they sometimes overlap. Let me distinguish them briefly, with examples of, and comments on, each group.

The first, and very common, method is murder by proxy, that is, delegating the deed to a third party, sometimes a trusted friend or adviser, sometimes a subordinate or professional hitman or a poverty-stricken opportunist. Wishing Clarence out of the way, Richard III gives two hired assassins the king's warrant for Clarence's execution, and intercepts the king's countermand order claiming, falsely, that it arrived too late. Buckingham's reluctance to arrange the murder of the two princes in the tower (a reluctance which seals his fate) forces Richard to hire Tyrrel, who himself subcontracts to Dighton and Forrest. These two inform Tyrrel that they have smothered the princes. (Tyrrel tells Richard that he has seen the bodies, and that the Tower chaplain “hath buried them” (4. 3. 17-19, 27-30) though he doesn't know where. It is odd, then, that the Duchess of York should know they were smothered to death (4. 4. 132-4). Coincidence? Intuition? The playwright's oversight?). Claudius confidently relies on the assistance of the King of England to eliminate his troublesome nephew, while Macbeth hires two desperadoes to rid him of Banquo and Fleance: in the first case what's done is undone, in the second only half done.

The second method is framing. In Titus Andronicus: Aaron, with the aid of a forged letter, frames Martius and Quintus for the murder of Bassianus (2. 3. 42-50, 268-75). Tamora, in on the ruse, exclaims tongue-in-cheek: “O wondrous thing! How easily murder is discoverèd!” (2. 3. 286-7). Macbeth's moral scruples and emotional jitters are overcome only when his wife assures him that they can expedite the murder of Duncan by incapacitating, by means of drink, the two chamberlains charged with guarding him but also laying upon them “the guilt of our great quell” (1. 7. 70-1). A relieved but callous Macbeth enthusiastically elaborates a scheme (Shakespeare's addition to Holinshed) to frame two innocent men: “Will it not be received, / When we have marked with blood those sleepy two / Of his own chamber, and used their very daggers, / That they have done it?” “Who,” Lady Macbeth assures him, “dares receive it other” (1. 7. 74-8). “I am settled,” says Macbeth, confident he can now proceed with minimal risk of detection.

The third cover-up strategy is to spread a rumor or false report. Finding his wife Anne an inconvenient obstacle to his marriage to Elizabeth, Richard III gives orders for her execution. “Rumor it abroad,” he commands Catesby, “that Anne my wife is very grievous sick … and like to die” (4. 2. 49-50, 56), her death being confirmed at 4. 3. 39. The strong implication, as Queen Elizabeth suspects at 4. 4. 282-3, is that he had her murdered to clear the way for re-marriage. “Now, Hamlet, hear,” says the Ghost, “'Tis given out that, sleeping in my orchard, / A serpent stung me” (1. 5. 35-6). In view of the dangling modifier, it is uncertain whether the King or the snake was doing the sleeping. (Kenneth Branagh's movie incongruously shows King Hamlet taking his siesta outdoors in the depths of winter, a time when snakes were presumably hibernating).

The fourth approach is to try and make death appear accidental. In As You Like It, Adam informs Orlando of Oliver's intention to make his murder seem an accident by burning down his lodging (2. 3. 22-4). In Hamlet, the implication is that Claudius himself devised and disseminated the serpent story, which was obviously designed to make the murder look like an accident or “death by misadventure,”² even though death by a “violent apoplexy” (as in Fratricide Punished) or by natural causes would have been entirely plausible. Claudius resorts to a similar cover-up on Hamlet's unexpected return to Denmark, hatching another plot “Under the which he shall not choose but fall; / And for his death no wind of blame shall breathe, / But even his mother shall uncharge the practice / And call it accident” (4. 7. 65-8). Under cover of placing a wager he will arrange a rigged duel between Hamlet and Laertes: his plan calls for an unbated sword which Laertes “with ease, / Or with a little shuffling” can choose since Hamlet “will not peruse the foils” (4. 6. 136-7), a grave miscalculation since Hamlet does, it turns out, inspect the foils (see 5. 2. 267). Laertes proposes what he thinks is a cunning elaboration: putting a deadly, and implicitly fast-acting, poison on the tip of Hamlet's sword. This tactic reduces even further the chances that death will be construed as accidental, for Hamlet might die within an hour (“In thee there is not half an hour's life,” 5. 2. 317) with no visible cause but a minor scratch on his skin. Although Claudius is aware that botched execution imperils the underlying purpose of his scheme, i.e., to make it look accidental, he fails to notice that Laertes' elaboration jeopardizes it even more.

The fifth, and least common (because most difficult), form of cover-up is to make death look a natural, i.e. non-violent, one.³ This form of camouflage is employed, or at least envisaged, in two plays generally thought to have been influenced by 2 Henry VI: Marlowe's Edward II (1591-2) and the anonymous Woodstock (1591-4). In Holinshed's Chronicles, Marlowe's source for Edward II, murderers hold the king down “and withall put into his fundament an horne, and through the same they thrust up into his bodie a hote spitte … so as no appearance of any wounds or hurt outwardlie might be once perceyved.”⁴ A hired assassin suggests to Lapoole, who is masterminding Woodstock's death, that, should an attempt to strangle him with a towel fail, he will “mall his old mazzard with this hammer …, and after cut's throat.” Lapoole strenuously objects: “No, wound him not, / It must be done so fair and cunningly / As if he died a common natural death, / For so we must give out to all that ask.” To which the murderer's accomplice replies: “There is no way then, but to smother him.”⁵ In the event Woodstock is strangled with a towel and then “smothered and stifled” with a featherbed: afterwards his hair and beard are smoothed down, his neck set straight. “Who can say that this man was murdered now?” gloats the first murderer. Lapoole orders the men to lay Woodstock's body in his bed, and to “shut the door, as if he there had died” (157). The natural death simulation, as far as I know, occurs in only one Shakespeare episode, the murder of the Duke of Gloucester in 2 Henry VI⁶, and even when combined with “murder by proxy,” as in Edward II and Woodstock, it turns out to be no more successful than other devices to deflect suspicion and blame. I now wish to investigate, in some detail, how this murder is instigated, carried out, and ultimately discovered.

Once they have doubted whether the charge of treason against Gloucester will succeed, the conspirators, prompted by Queen Margaret, cautiously sound each other out about the desirability of having him liquidated. Secretly coveting the crown for himself, the Duke of York asserts that the conspirators can confidently dispense with concealment, since, as nobles of the realm, they are powerful enough to withstand or divert adverse criticism and suspicion: “Now we three have spoken it, / It skills not greatly who impugns our doom.”⁷ Turning a deaf ear to York's arrogance, and with no further on-stage consultation with him, the Duke of Suffolk, in league with Cardinal Beaufort, opts for a cover-up: he proceeds to hire assassins (who, as usual in Shakespeare, remain anonymous) to commit the murder.

Neither of Shakespeare's major sources for the play, the chronicles of Hall nor Holinshed, mentions murderers. But murderers appear in both Q and F versions⁸ of the play, with one major difference. In Q, a stage direction calls for “two men” to be seen “smothering” the Duke “in his bed,” whereas in F “two or three” simply confirm, to Suffolk, that they have “dispatched this thing,” the actual method (or methods) remaining unspecified. In Q, Suffolk commands them: “Then see the cloathes laid smooth about him still, / That when the King comes, he may perceive / No other, but that he dide of his owne accord.” Supporting her argument with a parallel passage in Woodstock, Saunders (24) argues that Q's reference to bedclothes being “laid smooth” and the phrase “dide of his own accord” indicate “emphasis on a plausible suicide,” though she neglects to suggest of what kind. To cite a comparable case: in King Lear, Edmund employs a captain to kill both Cordelia and Lear, and later confesses his plan to avoid responsibility: the captain's “commission,” he explains, was “to hang Cordelia in the prison, and / To lay the blame upon her own despair, / That she fordid herself” (5. 3. 254-7). Cordelia, then, was supposed to have hanged herself. This is plausible enough, but surely not even a limited King like Henry would deduce, on the evidence before him, that Gloucester had taken his own life. Suffolk's corresponding words in F (“Have you laid fair the bed? Is all things well, / According as I gave instructions?”), words which again resemble similar passages in Woodstock, clearly indicate his intention: to make it appear, not that Gloucester had committed suicide, but that he had died a natural death.

Commanded by the King to summon Gloucester to his trial, Suffolk, pretending to tremble, answers the King's question “Where is our uncle?” by saying “dead in his bed” (4. 2. 28-9), a phrase traditionally associated with dying peacefully in one's sleep. The King faints: when he recovers he mounts a vicious attack on Suffolk, not accusing him directly of murder, but perhaps insinuating (with phrases like “thy poison,” “serpent's sting,” “murderous tyranny,” “basilisk”) his deep-seated suspicions.

The Earl of Warwick then announces a report claiming that Gloucester “traitorously is murdered” at the instigation of Suffolk and Beaufort, and that the angry commons demand confirmation and redress. Shakespeare must have read in Hall's Chronicles, and probably also in Holinshed (who copies Hall almost verbatim), that Gloucester's body was shown (neither says by whom) “to the lordes and commons, as though he had died of a palsey [paralysis, possibly the effect of a stroke] or emposthume [internal ulcer or abscess].” Because they leave no obvious external signs, the claim that these were the causes would have been conveniently difficult to deny. Hall continues (neither he nor Holinshed bother to indicate whether, in each case, “indifferent persons” refers to actual witnesses or later historians):

But all indifferent [impartial] persons well knewe, that he died of no natural death but of some violent force: some judged hym to be strangled: some affirme that a hote spitte was put in at his foundement: other [sic] write, that he was stiffeled or smoldered [smothered] between twoo fetherbeds.⁹

In Shakespeare's play, however, the report of the Duke's death is circulated and the commons' suspicions aroused before the King calls for Gloucester's corpse to be “viewed,”¹⁰ and whether or not the commons are present at the inspection (textual stage directions differ) the narratological difficulty is manifest. Shakespeare has not allowed enough time for anyone, even the murderers themselves, to spread or manipulate the fact of Gloucester's death.¹¹

The anguished King accepts the fact of Gloucester's death, conceding “how he died God knows, not Henry,” but, while Warwick is carrying out his order to “view his breathless corpse” and comment on “his sudden death,” he is again overcome with suspicion that “violent hands were laid on Humphrey's life” (3. 2. 130-2, 139); he is, however, “paralyzed by the anxiety of rendering false judgment.”¹² Looking for “true evidence of good esteem” (3. 2. 21) which the King had invoked before Gloucester's aborted trial, Warwick echoes the King as he sets out to conduct a kind of coroner's inquest; he, too, declares his belief (based on his initial inspection of the body) that “violent hands” (4. 2. 156) were laid on the Duke. Hattaway assumes that Warwick is “the only one on stage able to see the corpse,” and suggests that Warwick “is speaking only for effect, arousing horror in order to point the finger of suspicion at Suffolk” (152). Apart from the absurdity of an inspection at which only one person inspects, and the risk Warwick is taking if he is caught trying to prevent others from inspecting, the text makes it reasonably clear that the King, expressly invited by Warwick, has seen the corpse (3. 2. 149-52), and that Beaufort has too (cf. 3. 2. 171 and 3. 3. 15). In the BBC version, the audience is also treated to a close-up.

In what has been called “an early and rare example of forensic reasoning,”¹³ Warwick, having drawn the curtains from around Gloucester's bed, describes how “the blood is settled in his face” in a way inconsistent with the appearance of what he calls a “timely parted ghost,” a case of natural death he claims often to have seen: in such a case, he maintains, the face is “of ashy semblance, meager, pale and bloodless.” He then proceeds, for the sake of enhanced contrast, to expatiate on the grisly appearance of Gloucester's body:

But see, his face is black and full of blood,
His eyeballs further out than when he lived,
Staring full ghastly like a strangled man;
His hair upreared, his nostrils stretched with struggling;
His hands abroad displayed, as one that grasped
And tugged for life, and was by strength subdued.
Look, on the sheets his hair, you see, is sticking;
His well-proportioned beard made rough and ragged. …
It cannot be but he was murdered here:
The least of all these signs were probable.

(3. 2. 168-78)

In terms of modern forensic pathology, all the signs triumphantly listed by Warwick happen to be non-specific, that is, they do not point unequivocally to a violent death. Strangulation would have produced bruise-marks to the neck (whether on or under the skin), but Warwick doesn't mention or examine the neck at all: the red or blackened face, as well as the protruding eyes, are consistent with physical changes which occur, because of such factors as lapse of time and temperature and position of the body, whatever the actual cause of death (including hanging) may have been. He intimates signs of struggle: disheveled hair and rumpled beard, nostrils stretched, hands clutching the bedclothes—these, too, could have occurred after natural death (hands often tend to turn into claws because of muscular contraction).¹⁴

However, it's the dramatic impression which is important, and the impression to be conveyed is that Gloucester met a violent end. The reference to the face being “full of blood” (see also line 160) may reflect the belief that the body of a murdered man bleeds afresh when touched by, or even in the presence of, his murderer.¹⁵ We note Shakespeare has conspicuously avoided the two trumped-up but “official” interpretations of Gloucester's death (“palsey” or “emposthume”), as well as speculation about “a hote spitte” in the rectum, the very method Marlowe put to spectacular, as well as aptly symbolic, use in Edward II. In the opinion of some commentators, Shakespeare seems to have been confused as to whether Gloucester was smothered or strangled. According to Saunders, “hands grasping for life and roughened beard” point to smothering, but lines like “staring full ghastly like a strangled man” and other details “make strangulation, rather than smothering, the obvious verdict.”¹⁶ The stage direction in Q, we remember, shows the murderers smothering their victim, but even so Warwick's abbreviated account in Q implies strangulation. It's an inconsistency in Q which the ambiguous stage direction in F, which indicates an unspecified murder whether off stage or on, neatly obviates, but which the Oxford edition, and its Norton Shakespeare spin-off, unnecessarily reintroduces by substituting the stage direction in Q.¹⁷

From a coroner's point of view, crucial evidence is either missing or incomplete: we never learn how much time elapses between the murder and the murderers giving notification of it to Suffolk, though the stage direction in F that they are “running over the stage, from the murder of Gloucester,” seems to suggest haste (though we know Gloucester's death has only just occurred, we don't see Warwick touching the body to test whether it is still warm). The second murderer's rueful comment, “Didst ever hear a man so penitent?” suggests that Gloucester died calmly, more concerned with the state of his soul than with fending off his attackers. Though non-specific, some signs Warwick evinces are indeed, as Saunders says, more consistent with strangulation than with suffocation. Saunders, on the evidence of F, suggests that Shakespeare “opted for simple strangulation, off stage.”¹⁸ But Suffolk, with the need for concealment uppermost in his mind, would surely have instructed his henchmen to employ (as in Woodstock) the method of suffocation, which leaves no or few discernible traces.

Then why, we must ask, would the murderers have strangled their assigned victim, which is Warwick's interpretation (and one the audience is, I think, bound to accept), if their assigned task had been to feign a natural death by means of suffocation? It's quite possible they may have strangled Gloucester and smothered him, in keeping with the tendency of their fraternity towards overkill but clearly out of kilter with Suffolk's intentions and instructions (unless, of course, an ignorant Suffolk had been unaware strangulation leaves tell-tale signs). It is crucial to try and reconstruct those brief moments, seemingly insignificant at the time, which Suffolk spent off stage ostensibly summoning Gloucester to his trial. Did he actually see the dead Gloucester's face? Apparently not: he must have taken for granted that the murderers had done exactly as he had commanded, and remained off stage only long enough to give the impression he had seen the body. And so as he listens, with growing horror, to Warwick's revealing account of the visible state of Gloucester's corpse, he realizes, without knowing the reasons, that his cover-up scheme has misfired catastrophically.

Beaufort, his partner-in crime, has come to the same realization. When we meet him in the next scene (3.3) he is discovered in his bed, not dead like Gloucester, but raving and staring as if he were mad. In words echoing Suffolk's initial announcement, he makes a desperate attempt to conceal his complicity by insisting Gloucester's death was natural (“Died he not in his bed? Where should he die?”), but, in the delusion he is being tortured on the rack to extract a confession, abruptly promises to confess (though in fact he never does). He again imagines seeing Gloucester's eyeless ghost, and dies before the poison he has requested can be administered. To the assembled nobles, who include the King, his guilt is manifest: the Cardinal is the first of Shakespeare's characters who underestimate the power of guilt as a factor in the disclosure of a crime.

In Woodstock, the murderer thinks he has been successful in staging a “natural” death, boasting: “Never was murder done with such rare skill” (157), but the crime is soon detected. In fact, many English texts, from Chaucer onwards, proclaim the inevitability of murder, however well hidden, being discovered. In The Canterbury Tales we read “Mordre wol out, certeyn, it wol nat faille,” and “mordre wol out, that se we day by day.”¹⁹ The idea, a recurrent motif in Hall as well as in Holinshed, is a pervasive one in Shakespeare too.²⁰ Shakespeare's moral pattern is clear: for perpetrators of such a heinous crime as murder, detection is sure, and punishment, in this world or the next, rigorous. Admittedly, hired assassins, usually anonymous, can get away with murder: Shakespeare cannot bestir himself to bring such marginal characters to justice for fear of impeding dramatic momentum. But such is not the case with Suffolk, Beaufort and other murderers like Richard III, Macbeth and Claudius. Their attempted cover-ups are revealed, ultimately, as unavailing. Yet we should bear in mind that it is abiding suspicion of guilt, rather than absolute proof, which plays the most significant role in their eventual unmasking.

Notes

1. Shakespeare's Holinshed, ed. Richard Hosley (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1968), 11. Unless otherwise stated, all Shakespeare references are to Sylvan Barnet (ed.), The Complete Signet Classic Shakespeare (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972).

2. In Shakespeare's major source for Othello, Cinthio's Hecatommithi, the Iago figure suggests to Othello the following staged “accident”: “I propose we take a stocking, filled with sand, and beat Desdemona with it till she dies; thus will her body bear no sign of violence. When she is dead we can pull down a portion of the ceiling, and thus make it seem as if a rafter … had killed the lady. Suspicion cannot rest on you, since all men will impute her death to accident.” Staging problems (if he wanted to represent rather than report the murder), and the desire to preserve his hero's “nobility,” probably explain why Shakespeare chose a different death for Desdemona.

3. In consoling Hamlet both Gertrude (“all that lives must die / Passing through nature to eternity”), and, hypocritically, Claudius (“your father lost a father, / That father lost, lost his,” 1. 2. 72-3, 89-90), appear to refer to King Hamlet's death as if it had been a natural occurrence, not the bizarre and unfortunate accident as fabricated for public consumption. Natural death is so rare an event in drama (what others in Shakespeare, besides Mortimer and John of Gaunt, die of sheer old age?) that it almost becomes suspect in itself.

4. Cited in Edward II, ed. W. Moelwyn Merchant (London: Ernest Benn, 1967), 101.

5. Woodstock: A Moral History, ed. A. P. Rossiter (London: Chatto & Windus, 1946), 151.

6. The most useful and detailed study to date remains Claire Saunders, “‘Dead in His Bed’: Shakespeare's Staging of the Death of the Duke of Gloucester in 2 Henry VI,” Review of English Studies n. s. 25 (1984), 19-34. Despite her main title, she appears oblivious to the “natural death” subterfuge: issues of staging are her focus. She also compares this scene with its counterparts in Edward II and Woodstock.

7. 4. 1. 280-1. Cf. Lady Macbeth's “What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our pow'r to acompt” (5. 1. 39-41, an echo of 1. 7. 78). Cf. Richard III 3. 6. 10-4, King Lear 3. 7. 25-8, Pericles 4. 3. 12-9, and The Tempest 2. 1. 290-4.

8. By “Q” I mean W. A. Wright (ed.), The First Part of the Contention of the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster [1594] (London and Cambridge: Macmillan, 1883), and by “F” the Folio text of 1623 in the Signet edition cited in note #1.

9. Edward Hall, cited in Saunders 23. Cf. Holinshed 174. In citing these sources, one editor comments that “no cause of death could be perceived.” Michael Hattaway (ed.), The Second Part of King Henry VI (Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1991), 146. Surely he means “could not be unanimously agreed upon.”

10. “Enter his chamber, view his breathless corpse” (4. 2. 132). “View” (cf. Warwick's “view this body” at line 149) was “the usual term in the direction to a coroner's jury.” Andrew S. Cairncross (ed.), The Second Part of King Henry VI (London: Methuen, 1957), 85.

11. We do not hear what becomes of these murderers (though in the BBC Wars of the Roses of 1964 they were shown being broken on the wheel). Sometimes assassins were themselves killed to avoid potential betrayal (as in Woodstock, Edward II and The Spanish Tragedy), or packed off to a foreign country “for safe sanctuary.” Martin Wiggins, Journeymen in Murder: The Assassin in English Renaissance Drama (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 25, 74 et seq. It was unimaginably imprudent of Suffolk to invite the murderers to go to his house to collect their “reward” for their “venturous deed” (3. 2. 8-9).

12. I owe this compact phrase to my colleague Edward I. Berry, Patterns of Decay: Shakespeare's Early Histories (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia), 41 (he cites 3. 2. 139-40).

13. Margaret Miner and Hugh Rawson, The Penguin Dictionary of Quotations from Shakespeare (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1995), 36. The only other case which occurs to me is Caesar's attempt to determine how Cleopatra and her lady companions died: North's Plutarch insists there was “no mark seen of her body, or any sign discerned that she was poisoned.” Cited by David Bevington (ed.), Antony and Cleopatra (Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1990), 257.

14. I am grateful to Dr. Kerry Pringall, pathologist at the Royal Jubilee Hospital in Victoria, for sharing his professional expertise with me. See also John Charles Bucknill, Shakespeare's Medical Knowledge (London: Longman, 1860), 175.

15. 3. 2. 168-78. Cf. my opening paragraph, and Richard III 1. 2. 55-9. For further references see A Dictionary of Superstitions, ed. Iona Opie and Moira Tatem (Oxford: Oxford U P, 1992), 270.

16. Saunders 23. See Horace Howard Furness (ed.), Othello, New Variorum Edition (New York, 1965), 302-7, for some reflections, including expert medical testimony, as to whether Desdemona was smothered, strangled, stabbed, or some ingenious combination of all three. Stage directions, as with Gloucester's death, differ.

17. The “Textual Note” in Norton trumpets this substitution as “a striking change,” claiming that the Oxford edition of 2 Henry IV, “like many others, uses many of Q's stage directions to clarify playhouse practice.” The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: Norton, 1997), 211. But in this particular instance most editions, by retaining the F stage direction, avoid perpetuating a problem which can puzzle readers and spectators alike.

18. Saunders 23.

19. The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson, 2nd ed. (London: Oxford U P, 1957), 62 (“The Prioress's Tale,” line 576), and 201 (“The Nun's Priest's Tale,” line 3052).

20. In Richard III, a murderer of Clarence says he will make good his escape once he has been remunerated, “for this will out” (3. 4. 286). Murder, says Gobbo, resembles bastard progeny in that it “cannot be hid long” (The Merchant of Venice 2. 2. 79). Hamlet reflects that “murder, though it have no tongue, will speak / With most miraculous organ” (4. 2. 600-1, cf. 1. 3. 257-8). Cf. Twelfth Night 3. 1. 149-50, and Macbeth 3. 4. 122-6. Under “Murder will out” in A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1950), 585, Morris Palmer Tilley also cites examples from Kyd, Marlowe, Dekker, Webster, and Tourneur.