Shakespeare's ghost is in the Net. Last fall, Stuart Harris, an English filmmaker living in California, wrote a hilarious 80-line sendup of Hamlet. He formed a virtual acting troupe culled from Internet Relay Chat junkies and dubbed them the Hamnet Players. The first attempt to perform Hamnet ended in disaster when a lightning bolt cut power to Harris's access provider. In a later, successful performance, Ian Taylor, a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, played Hamlet.
For these performances, "actors" from all over the world log on at a pre-arranged time and convene in Internet Relay Chat's #hamnet auditorium. The script serves as a springboard for the players, who mercilessly ham up their lines by juxtaposing Shakespeare's poetry and plots with IRC jargon and speed-writing conventions, irreverent obscenity, clever puns, and references to contemporary yuppie lifestyle. Hamlet's famous 35-line "To be or not to be" soliloquy is reduced to a mere "2b or not 2b." "Get thee to a nunnery" becomes "suggest u /JOIN #nunnery."
Hamnet was followed by performances of PCbeth - An IBM Clone of Macbeth, in which Banquo changes his nickname after his murder to GhostBan, a double play on the character of Banquo and on the IRC +b command, which bans a person from a server.
Logs of performances and color images of the Hamnet players in costume are available on WWW: http://www.bath.ac.uk/~abpgah/pcbeth.html.
ELECTRIC WORD
Hamming it up on the Net
