Fratricide broadly on the Ramayana and on Rama's killing of Raavan with the active support of the latter's estranged younger brother Vibhisan - on whom Raavan had vowed black vengeance and on the killing of Bali (again by Rama) with the ready contrivance of his younger, disgruntled and banished, sibling Sugreev, has succinctly expressed this in a couplet: "Irony? What Irony?! If not that the seed of destruction carried in the heart of one brother was sowed and reaped to the full by the hand of another!" The only known fratricide in the Roman Empire is the fairly well known murder
Fratricide Punished the second quarto (1604) and folio (1623), as well as elements uniquely its own. This is a remarkably problematic finding for Shakespeare scholars, complicating an area already made difficult by the discovery of Q1. Indeed, the majority of what has been written about "Fratricide Punished" exists strictly to better understand its relation to Q1 "Hamlet", such that it becomes troublesome to discuss one without the other. Yet, as it contains elements of all three versions, it seems clear that "Fratricide Punished" must have been reconstructed by an actor with knowledge of more than one version of "Hamlet". Kathleen Irace, in