As a hyperobject embedded with potential, a playtext offers a code, a matrix that may be activated in an infinite number of possible performances (Pye and Gargano, Variable Objects: Shakespeare and Speculative Appropriation, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2021). Appropriations and adaptations of a play co-opt the source’s network code and recircuit it to make an altogether new matrix that reverberates and repurposes the original. Remnants of previous codes may “ghost” through a play, as Marvin Carlson argues (The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine, University of Michigan Press, 2001), but the coded network for performance can also position performers and audience/spectators in a feedback loop with the original. Such is the case with James Ijames’ Fat Ham. This essay explores how Fat Ham rearranges the performance code of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and in doing so, how Ijames democratizes Shakespeare. This essay also examines how Fat Ham uses karaoke as both a prop and a theatrical device by engaging with Walter Benjamin’s notion of reproduction and reactivation, which places a work in conversation with the original. Using these concepts, this essay ultimately argues that karaoke is a parallel for Shakespearean performance writ large, as each new production reactivates and democratizes Shakespeare’s texts and situates them in the present moment.