The Second Murderer stands apart from his companion as a figure caught between the demands of employment and the stirrings of moral feeling. Hired by the Duke of Gloucester to execute the Duke of Clarence, this unnamed assassin finds himself unable to suppress the voice of conscience even as financial reward and his partner’s contempt push him toward the deed. In their exchange before Clarence’s drowning, the Second Murderer articulates what many of the play’s other characters cannot: a clear recognition that the act they are about to commit is damnable, that no money can truly purchase the soul’s acquittal from such a crime.
What makes the Second Murderer dramatically significant is his internal struggle, which plays out in real time. When his partner appeals to greed and swagger, the Second Murderer wavers, allowing himself to be convinced by the promise of reward. Yet even as he agrees, his language reveals the cost of that agreement. He speaks of conscience as “a dangerous thing” that “makes a man a coward,” and his bitter catalogue of conscience’s effects—it prevents theft, swearing, adultery—sounds almost admiring in its precision. He understands, with painful clarity, that what he is about to do will mark him forever. His famous line, “Some certain dregs of conscience are yet within me,” captures a man not yet fully corrupted, still capable of feeling the weight of what he contemplates.
After the murder of Clarence, the Second Murderer’s final lines—“A bloody deed, and desperately dispatch’d!”—reveal a man already regretting the irreversible act, wishing he could “wash” his hands like Pilate. Unlike Richard, Buckingham, and the First Murderer, he does not harden himself into indifference. His exit from the play marks the beginning of his haunting by what he has done. In Shakespeare’s moral economy, the Second Murderer becomes a cautionary figure: the man who knows better, who feels the call of conscience, but who yields nonetheless to pressure and greed. His small role carries the weight of a profound warning about how corruption spreads—not through fanatics or ideologues, but through ordinary men whose better nature surrenders, bit by bit, to circumstance and temptation.
