<i>Fratricide Punished</i>, a one-act play by an unknown author.

Fratricide Punished is a one-act play by an unknown author. The student director who selected this play noted that it was a "one-act version of Hamlet with the three witches thrown in" (or something like that). I never questioned that analysis until I began researching the history of the play as part of this slide-scanning project.

A bit of Google research turns up two references to Fratricide Punished.

In The Michigan Alumnus, Volume 66, Page 240, an unidentified author (possibly William P. Halstead) writes "Shakespearean plays, of course, are frequently staged. But this month, the laboratory playbill includes an early 17th Century improvised version of Hamlet called Fratricide Punished, which was played in Germany in Elizabethan times by the touring English Players and actors who found better reception In Germany than they did in London."

E.K. Chambers, writing in A Literary History of Hamlet writes "There is another source from which it has been suggested that we may perhaps get some idea of what the pre-Shakespearian Hamlet was like. This is the German version, known as Der bestrafte Brudermord, or Fratricide Punished. The existing text dates only from 1710, but in the opinion of some scholars it is a degenerate form of a play, written not later than 1589."

In any case, for the student production the director wanted a multi-layer set in which he could freely place actors in any context. He also wanted a prominent space for two thrones for the king and queen. So, I thought, he wanted platforms. Platforms were in common used; each consisted of a sheet of plywood mounted on a frame of 2x10 or 2x12 dimensional lumber. Each platform was thus about 11 to 13 inches high.

The Speech Department owned numerous platforms, some in storage, some in use in workshops, and some in use elsewhere. Finding them all took some patience but eventually I compiled a list of all available platforms and made cardboard cutouts to represent them. After arranging the cutouts in a possible stage set I presented it to the director. He loved it. He then proceeded to rearrange the cutouts to suit his concept, ending with "The King and Queen go here!"

Rounding up the platforms proved more difficult than inventorying them but eventfully we got them moved to theater. We painted them all black and arranged them following the cardboard model, with the two thrones in the designated spot.

Fratricide Punished turned out to be the easiest set design I did. It took a while to arrange the platforms (platforms are heavy!), but not much artistic creativity. Just a lot of black paint.