English wine cask units the mediæval French and Italian "botte") or pipe was half a tun, or 1008 pints. Tradition has it that George, Duke of Clarence, the brother of Edward IV of England, was drowned in a butt of malmsey on 18 February 1478. (However, Josephine Tey in "The Daughter of Time" suggests that "drowned in a butt of malmsey" means rather that George, Duke of Clarence, drank himself to death rather than literally drowning in a container of wine.) In Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Cask of Amontillado", the narrator claims he has received "a pipe of what passes for Amontillado".
The True Tragedy of Richard III single text of the play, the 1594 quarto, is notably inferior. Modern critics have tended to treat it as a bad quarto and a "reported text." Individual commentators have nominated Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Lodge, George Peele, and Thomas Kyd, among other writers of their generation, as possible authors or revisers of the play; but no scholarly consensus in favour of any single candidate or hypothesis has evolved. "The True Tragedy" bears a general resemblance to Shakespeare's "Richard III", as any play on the same subject would. Critics are not unanimous on the view that Shakespeare used "The True Tragedy" as