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.
