Is there anything less Shakespearean, less heroic, than a to- do list? And yet Hamlet and Oliver Queen (aka, Green Arrow or just “the Hood” on the CW's popular, primetime TV show Arrow) both “live to say ‘this thing's to do’ “ (Hamlet, Sc.14.41). In the case of Hamlet, it is to follow the Ghost's order to kill his uncle; in the case of Oliver, it is to hunt down and kill the people whom his father has marked for death. Of course, many stories follow an avenger as he or she works down a list, but Arrow's ongoing story arc is pointedly Hamlet- driven, as revealed in this exchange, featured in Season 1, episode 3:

While tracing Shakespearean quotation and situation is now a common scholarly task, Arrow, I think, is especially interesting because it raises Hamlet- like situations but responds to those situations in ways that question and critique the original. Specifically, what interests me here are three things:

• 1. The extent to which neither protagonist is actually setting his own course. These so- called heroes are more like errand- boys who begin to question whether what they do is morally defensible;

• 2. To what extent characters remain static. By marking names down, by turning life into a laundry list of acts to be completed, both Hamlet and Oliver treat people as if they were objects, things that are already dead. Hamlet's ghost, in this respect, has a particular resonance. Ghosts never change; but the living do; and,

• 3. Above all, I am interested in the ways in which Arrow interrogates its originator.

We can begin by looking at the similarities of our avenging protagonists. Hamlet seems to be a frat boy; his choice of school chums, Rosencrantz and Gyldensterne, is questionable; he fully admits that he likes to drink with his friends; I can easily imagine his University of Wittenberg dorm having the Early Modern era's equivalent of a beer bong.