'Hamlet''s Arab journey: Adventures in political culture and drama (1952--2002)

This study traces the appropriations of Shakespeare's Hamlet in modern Arabic literature and Arab public culture. Drawing on methods from anthropology, literary history, and performance studies, I show how Hamlet came to the Arab world through a "global kaleidoscope" of models and has been deployed to serve a variety of rhetorical ends. Today's Arab polemicists tend to use "to be or not to be" as an urgent, collective call to arms. Such rhetoric relies on a shared image of Hamlet as a positive revolutionary hero, a martyr for justice in an out-of-joint world. Challenging the prevailing accounts of postcolonial literary appropriation, I argue that this image developed in the Egyptian theatre in the 1960s in dialogue with a broad array of international artistic models (particularly Soviet and Eastern versions) and in response to local political needs. The heroic Arab Hamlet enjoyed a brief heyday after 1970, only to wither by 1976 under a blistering post-political irony. Recent Arab offshoot plays have featured passive, silent anti-Hamlets as protagonists; instead, their imaginative center is a monstrous and self-justifying Claudius. Offering the first systematic account of Arab Hamlet appropriation, my study helps illuminate the shifting political reflexes and rhetorical strategies of twentieth-century intellectuals in Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq. By focusing on Hamlet himself as a political rewriter, it also highlights an often forgotten dimension of Shakespeare's text.