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Multicultural Shakespeare: Translation, Appropriation and Performance
Since Najib al-Haddad and Tanyusʻ Abdu’s first Arabic versions of Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet at the end of the 19th century, the reception of Shakespeare in the Arab world has gone through a process of adaptation, Arabization, and translation proper. We consider the process of Arabization / domestication of Shakespeare’s plays since Najib al-Haddad’s adaptation of Romeo and Juliet and Tanyusʻ Abdu’s adaptation of Hamlet, to the achievements of Khalīl Mutran and Muhammad Hamdi. We underline, as particular examples of Shakespeare’s appropriation, the literary response of Ali Ahmed Bakathir, Muhammad al-Maghut and Mamduh Udwan, with a particular stress on Khazal al-Majidi and his adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays. All these writers reposition Shakespeare’s plays in an entirely different cultural space.
When the first Critical Survey special issue on Arab Shakespeares (CS 19:3, Winter 2007) came out nearly a decade ago, the topic was a curiosity. There existed no up-to-date monograph in English on Arab theatre, let alone on Arab Shakespeare. Few Arabic plays had been translated into English. Few British or American theatregoers had seen a play in Arabic. In the then tiny but fast-growing field of international Shakespeare appropriation studies (now ‘Global Shakespeare’) there was a great post-9/11 hunger to know more about the Arab world but also a lingering prejudice that Arab interpretations of Shakespeare would necessarily be derivative or crude, purely local in value. Nearly a decade later, this special issue offers a variety of perspectives on the history and role of Arab Shakespeare translation, production, adaptation, and criticism. With two essays and an interview focused on the twentieth century, we have avoided an exclusive and ahistorical focus on the present. We have also striven to strike a balance between internationally and locally focused Arab/ic Shakespeare appropriations, and between Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets. In addition to Egyptian and Palestinian theatre, our contributors examine everything from an Omani performance in Qatar and an Upper Egyptian television series to the origin of the sonnets and an English-language novel about the Lebanese civil war. They address materials produced in several languages: literary Arabic (fuṣḥā), Egyptian colloquial Arabic (‘ammiyya), Moroccan colloquial Arabic (darija), Swedish, French, and English. They include veteran scholars, directors, and translators as well as emerging scholars from diverse disciplinary and geographic locations, a testament to the vibrancy of this field.
Shakespeare Survey 71, 2018
The present paper is an attempt to highlight the corpus of Shakespeare in Arabic translations and adaptations. More recently, Hamlet and Richard III, for instance, have been re-cast, re-set and recreated in the Arab world in numerous adaptations and appropriations; attesting to the multiplicity rather than the uniqueness of a Shakespearean text. Although Hamlet and Richard III seem to do nothing with colonial/postcolonial discourse, the paper aims at finding out the curiosities behind and the growing interest in translating and appropriating such texts. Seemingly, by invoking Shakespeare, Arabs do not necessarily respond to a former colonizer or intend to be part of the postcolonial model of writing-back; rather they use Shakespeare as a text- a case to be examined whether such use is in pursuit of canon or it signals the inequality between languages. Beyond a binary relationship between the original texts and the rewritings, the paper also problematizes and questions the validity of appropriating Shakespeare and using his works as a vehicle to muse in contemporary issues of the Arab world.
Shakespeare Survey 71, 2018
Peter Holland asked Katherine Hennessey and me for a writeup of our "Arab Shakespeares" panel at the 2016 World Shakespeare Congress in London.
Yemen and Shakespeare are not commonly associated with each other, yet a surprisingly rich and idiosyncratic history of Yemeni Shakespeare productions exists. This article traces that history, to contextualize a recent Yemeni adaptation of The Merchant of Venice, in which Portia appears as a masked Arab warrior, and Shy-lock as a Hadhrami cloth trader. In productions that range from a uniquely Yeme-ni Othello, its final scene rewritten to punish Iago, to Yemen's variegated adaptations of Romeo and Juliet and Julius Caesar, Yemen's Shakespearean performances provide a powerful example of " glocalized " Shakespeare: that is, adaptations of the now globalized literary tradition of the Bard, refracted through distinctly local characteristics and concerns.
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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