The Hamnet Players is a virtual theater group, founded in 1993 by Stuart Harris, an English writer living in San Diego, California.
There have been six Hamnet Players productions, beginning in 1993 with a virtual theatre performance using Internet Relay Chat (IRC), based on William Shakespeare's Hamlet.
[2] The Hamnet Players were founded in 1993 by Stuart Harris, an English actor, computer consultant, and expert on IRC living in San Diego, California.
[6] Harris created a designated chat channel on IRC named #hamnet, where actors and spectators could meet, with casting carried out on the day of the performance.
[5] The play was performed a second time three months later on 6 February 1994, featuring the Royal Shakespeare Company's Ian Taylor as the principal character.
The Hamnet Players replaced the archaic and literary language of William Shakespeare with colloquial Anglo-American English and internet slang.
His execution of the sign-off command in IRC appeared on the screen as follows: This is a reference to a well-known line in Richard III.
The move did not go unnoticed: [9] In her paper "Curtain Time 20:00 GMT; Experiments with Virtual Theater on Internet Relay Chat", Brenda Danet says of "Hamnet" that the "...gross reduction of the length of the text and caricaturization of plot and action, along with transformation of hallowed Renaissance poetry into late 20th century colloquial prose and even lowly slang ... transform the play into a kind of typed Punch and Judy show".
The online potential for spontaneity and improvisation was both realised and cursed, however, when a bot unintentionally killed Hamlet halfway through the production.