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.
So I did actually write it.
Its first title was Rationalist Hamlet, back when it was a short fan contribution to the Alternate Parallels section of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. When I found myself actually trying to write the full thing, its working title became A Will Most Incorrect to Heaven. When I realized I was going to try to make it something approaching marketable, I saw that the only logical title was Hamlet and the Philosopher's Stone. But the actual, official title is, simply, The Tragedy of Prince Hamlet and the Philosopher's Stone, or, A Will Most Incorrect to Heaven by William Shakespeare.
It's a full-length play. I wrote it to be performable, but mostly I wrote it to be read. As of today, I'm self-publishing it and selling it as an e-book for $3.00 (that's the standard e-book price of $2.99, plus a cent to help people make a more rational purchasing decision). If you don't have a bank account and you have 50+ karma on this site, send me a private message with your email address. But I would prefer people paid for it (here's the link again, and here's an excerpt). Charging may seem gauche, but I suspect there's the illusion of a social norm against charging for fanfiction just because it's normally illegal. This work is an exception: the Harry Potter content is purely allusive, and Shakespeare won't be complaining.
The mission statement of the play is roughly the same as that of Methods of Rationality or Alicorn's Twilight re-imagining Luminosity. The philosophy in it is of course my own, but I don't disagree on any major points with Eliezer. As with Methods, I've written it to be enjoyable to people who have no direct exposure to Shakespeare's Hamlet and also to Shakespeare aficionados who have never heard of Less Wrong or even of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The play is a rewrite of Hamlet that preserves much of the original style, language, and plot, while injecting references to modern culture, epistemology, and ethics. It's perhaps what Shakespeare would have written, had he been simultaneously trying to appeal to audiences of both his time and our own. The Philosopher's Stone, for example, would be familiar to subjects of either Queen Elizabeth. The play's formatting is modeled after the way most of us encounter written Shakespeare: the spelling is updated and standardized, the stage directions are minimal and mostly of the sort that can be inferred from the dialogue, and the language is Elizabethan English from circa 1599; any anachronism is unintentional, aside from a certain wry punctuation mark and other allusions to future art. The only major change to the structure is the play's length: while unabridged productions of Hamlet can run up to five hours, the more concise Tragedy of Prince Hamlet and the Philosopher's Stone, or, A Will Most Incorrect to Heaven by William Shakespeare clocks in at well under two. Oh, and I changed all the words. There are only a few lines from the original in there.
I'm eager, of course, for feedback. Hope you enjoy!