Zoe Maroko, Ege Yilmaz, Becca Healy

Professor Phillips & Professor Wall

Intro to Shakespeare

25/2/2021

Hamlet: The Game Show! (Our Rationale)

The main focus of our scene was to highlight as well as satirize Hamlet’s indecisiveness and

resulting irrational behavior. To do this, we put him in the context of a “Who Wants to Be a

Millionaire” type game show, where his indecisive tendencies cause him to lose the game, using

his famous speech in act three scene one. (3.1) In order to best highlight these traits, we cut down

his speech just a bit so that it was still wordy, but more question dense than anything else.

Hamlet asks himself those rather lofty questions, and in trying to find the answer, transitions to a

different quandary, as pointed out by the host. We wrote in the character of the gameshow host

for comedic effect, but also to further satirize how dramatic Hamlet is, as the juxtaposition of his

lines to the host’s more modern, colloquial tone made for an interesting contrast. When it came

to Ophelia, we implemented a similar strategy. We edited Hamlet and Ophelia’s exchange to

make Ophelia’s lines seem shorter in contrast to Hamlet’s longer ones, and also added some

modern text for her in order to highlight the ridiculousness of Hamlet’s behavior and emphasize

how she is affected by this.. The result is something far less dark than the original tone of the

scene, but also highlights the way in which Hamlet’s tentative nature causes him to think

everything through to a fault and be distrusting of those closest to him, much to his own

detriment. Though we used a comedic tone to portray this thought, it certainly does not mean he

is comically irrational when one looks at the big picture, as it is this trait that ends in tragedy.