Bought it, read it, loved it. Well worth the $3 for the entertainment value (large value), for helping me understand Shakespeare by providing modern pop culture references in a Shakespearean-style comic dialogue (medium value), and for colorfully illustrating some rationality techniques (small but still positive value).
I have read, watched, and enjoyed several other Shakespeare plays, but never Hamlet. I was still able to follow along; the overall plot and characterization was quite clear. The quality of the jokes, the pace of the narrative, and the density and execution of the plot twists were all excellent. I would rate this piece in the top 20% of fiction of a similar length that I have paid for.
As constructive criticism, I would say that: (1) shortening the play might make for a more entertaining performance, but it also makes for a less entertaining read. There was just less in this play than in King Lear, or Romeo & Juliet, or A Midsummer Night’s Dream, or Macbeth. Fewer characters, fewer plot lines, and fewer things that make you say “hmm.” If you write another play, you might try for the full length next time. (2) Not having read either Hamlet or Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are dead, I wasn’t really able to follow along with either the humor or the plot of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern. This affected my enjoyment of the ending. If there’s something you can do to flesh out these two characters a bit more, I thin you should. (3) The meter could use some improvement. It’s perfectly serviceable for fanfic, but if you wanted to make a polished literary work, then you should go back over your lines and ensure that the length of each phrase and each paragraph is serving some kind of auditory and/or dramatic purpose. I thought you did this only inconsistently; there was a line that struck me as ‘off’ of the appropriate meter (and instead just written in ordinary 21st century conversational tones) about every twenty lines.
Again, these are nitpicks. They are my thoughts on what you would have to do to create a play that was every bit as good as Shakespeare’s are. While today’s physicists routinely outperform Newton in terms of the quality of their models, it is somewhat harder to do this in the fine arts, because the fine arts are less replicable then the physical sciences. So, congratulations! I think you’ve done something special here, and I hope you’ll do it again.
This, basically. The ability to write like Shakespeare, rather than like what people think of Shakespeare, really brings him to life, and doing it so that a modern audience can get the jokes is something the world needs more of.
Bought it, read it, loved it. Well worth the $3 for the entertainment value (large value), for helping me understand Shakespeare by providing modern pop culture references in a Shakespearean-style comic dialogue (medium value), and for colorfully illustrating some rationality techniques (small but still positive value).
I have read, watched, and enjoyed several other Shakespeare plays, but never Hamlet. I was still able to follow along; the overall plot and characterization was quite clear. The quality of the jokes, the pace of the narrative, and the density and execution of the plot twists were all excellent. I would rate this piece in the top 20% of fiction of a similar length that I have paid for.
As constructive criticism, I would say that: (1) shortening the play might make for a more entertaining performance, but it also makes for a less entertaining read. There was just less in this play than in King Lear, or Romeo & Juliet, or A Midsummer Night’s Dream, or Macbeth. Fewer characters, fewer plot lines, and fewer things that make you say “hmm.” If you write another play, you might try for the full length next time. (2) Not having read either Hamlet or Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are dead, I wasn’t really able to follow along with either the humor or the plot of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern. This affected my enjoyment of the ending. If there’s something you can do to flesh out these two characters a bit more, I thin you should. (3) The meter could use some improvement. It’s perfectly serviceable for fanfic, but if you wanted to make a polished literary work, then you should go back over your lines and ensure that the length of each phrase and each paragraph is serving some kind of auditory and/or dramatic purpose. I thought you did this only inconsistently; there was a line that struck me as ‘off’ of the appropriate meter (and instead just written in ordinary 21st century conversational tones) about every twenty lines.
Again, these are nitpicks. They are my thoughts on what you would have to do to create a play that was every bit as good as Shakespeare’s are. While today’s physicists routinely outperform Newton in terms of the quality of their models, it is somewhat harder to do this in the fine arts, because the fine arts are less replicable then the physical sciences. So, congratulations! I think you’ve done something special here, and I hope you’ll do it again.
This, basically. The ability to write like Shakespeare, rather than like what people think of Shakespeare, really brings him to life, and doing it so that a modern audience can get the jokes is something the world needs more of.