| This dissertation offers a study of British colonial legacy in the Arab intellectual tradition, examining in particular the uses made of William Shakespeare (1564–1616) in novels, dramas, poetry and film from 1890–1990. It does not provide a survey of all the translations or even adaptations of Shakespeare's works; and it focuses more on Shakespeare's plays than his poetry. My selection criteria for the pieces used included formal innovation; topical innovation; and demonstrable cultural, sexual, and political ambivalence as expressed in new or surprising ways. By using Shakespeare, Arab authors in the last century have been able to give voice to problems, possibilities and questions of identity that, without him, might have remained unexpressed.; This study makes the following contributions: it reassesses and theorizes the field of Shakespeare adaptation into, and allusion in, Arabic; it considers the role imperial politics and society played in the rise of Egyptian theater and film, and the role of translations and adaptations of, as well as references to, Shakespeare therein; and it charts, through several case studies, a century of dealing with cultural problems in translating and adapting Shakespeare into Egyptian text and cinema, most extensively with Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and Othello. In particular, it demonstrates that references to Shakespeare enable cultural, political, and formal experimentation. Ultimately the dissertation formulates an argument for the overarching role Shakespeare has played in Egyptian artistic production, and the cultural and psychological dimensions of that role in the formation and representation of Arab intellectual self-fashioning. Finally, as a function of its answering the question, ‘why Shakespeare,’ I articulate a theory of cultural idealization that centers on the blurry myth of origins that continues to shroud Shakespeare in a kind of cultural ambivalence: we may never know he was, and that lack allows for a set of productive projections that can create a new mythology and in so doing, rewrite the possibilities for self and narrative in Arab culture. |
