Note 34 — ACT II.

This line would seem to belong to the Spanish Tragedy, but it is not in the text that has come down. When Horatio is stabbed by the assassins, Bellimperia cries:—“Murder! murder! Help, Hieronimo, help!” She is forced off the stage, and then Hieronimo enters, exclaiming, “What outcries pluck me from my naked bed!” (a much-ridiculed line). But in a passage of Jonson’s Poetaster (iii. 1), where there is clearly an allusion to Jeronimo, we find the line (slightly altered) that Quicksilver quotes:—

“2d Pyr. Ay, but somebody must cry Murder! then in a small voice. Tuc. Your fellow-sharer there shall do’t: cry, sirrah, cry! 1st Pyr. Murder, murder! 2d Pyr. Who calls out murder? lady, was it you?”