For the past five decades, Arab intellectuals have seen
themselves in Shakespeare's Hamlet: their times "out of joint,"
their political hopes frustrated by a corrupt older generation.
"Hamlet's Arab Journey" traces the uses of "Hamlet" in Arabic
theatre and political rhetoric, and asks how Shakespeare's play
developed into a musical with a happy ending in 1901 and grew to
become the most obsessively quoted literary work in Arab politics
today. Explaining the Arab "Hamlet" tradition, Margaret Litvin also
illuminates the "to be or not to be" politics that have turned
Shakespeare's tragedy into the essential Arab political text, cited
by Arab liberals, nationalists, and Islamists alike.
On the Arab stage, Hamlet has been an operetta hero, a firebrand
revolutionary, and a muzzled dissident. Analyzing productions from
Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, and Kuwait, Litvin follows the distinct
phases of Hamlet's naturalization as an Arab. Her fine-grained
theatre history uses personal interviews as well as scripts and
videos, reviews, and detailed comparisons with French and Russian
"Hamlets." The result shows Arab theatre in a new light. Litvin
identifies the French source of the earliest Arabic "Hamlet," shows
the outsize influence of Soviet and East European Shakespeare, and
explores the deep cultural link between Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser
and the ghost of Hamlet's father.
Documenting how global sources and models helped nurture a
distinct Arab "Hamlet" tradition, "Hamlet's Arab Journey"
represents a new approach to the study of international Shakespeare
appropriation.
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