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...