Hamlet's Arab Journey: Shakespeare's Prince and Nasser's Ghost (Translation/Transnation) Hardcover – October 23, 2011 by Margaret Litvin (Author)

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.

Editorial Reviews
Review
"Absorbing . . . fascinating . . . richly detailed." - TLS

"Litvin succeeds in describing the Arab Hamlet as a political and sociological phenomenon, without ever losing her grasp on the aesthetic. She is also refreshingly free from literary theory orthodoxies. . . . Rather, in engaging and lucid prose, she tells a story, and it is a compelling one." - The Oxonian Review

"Underneath Litvin's scholarly chill, there is a lyrical elegy: at once she laments the passing of Egypt's theatrical golden age and the political dream that inspired it. . . . [An] agile negotiation of the uses and abuses of the Hamlet tale." - Bidoun
Review
"A fascinating look at how one of the Western world's most iconic literary characters has been appropriated by Arabs as a symbol of secularism, nationalism, or Islamism, depending on the prevailing political mood. Hamlet's Arab Journey is not just a brilliant work of literary analysis―it is a wholly new way of thinking about modern Arab literary and political culture. Indeed, Litvin presents readers with a fresh interpretation of Arab history in the twentieth century, one told through the lens of perhaps the most famous play in the world. This is bold, clever, and fresh scholarship, written in clear and accessible prose, and intended for anyone who cares about the power of literature to transform society―for good or bad."―Reza Aslan, author No god but God and Beyond Fundamentalism

"Presenting a strong and convincing argument, fascinating details, good historical contextualization, and a fast-paced narrative, this engrossing book shows how various productions and manifestations of Hamlet are in conversation with each other and with an enormous range of intellectual and artistic regions in the Arab world. It will reanimate conversations amongst various audiences interested in contemporary Arab cultural creation, the interplay of politics and culture, and of course, Shakespeare."―Marilyn Booth, University of Edinburgh
From the Inside Flap
"A fascinating look at how one of the Western world's most iconic literary characters has been appropriated by Arabs as a symbol of secularism, nationalism, or Islamism, depending on the prevailing political mood.Hamlet's Arab Journey is not just a brilliant work of literary analysis--it is a wholly new way of thinking about modern Arab literary and political culture. Indeed, Litvin presents readers with a fresh interpretation of Arab history in the twentieth century, one told through the lens of perhaps the most famous play in the world. This is bold, clever, and fresh scholarship, written in clear and accessible prose, and intended for anyone who cares about the power of literature to transform society--for good or bad."--Reza Aslan, author No god but God and Beyond Fundamentalism

"Presenting a strong and convincing argument, fascinating details, good historical contextualization, and a fast-paced narrative, this engrossing book shows how various productions and manifestations of Hamlet are in conversation with each other and with an enormous range of intellectual and artistic regions in the Arab world. It will reanimate conversations amongst various audiences interested in contemporary Arab cultural creation, the interplay of politics and culture, and of course, Shakespeare."--Marilyn Booth, University of Edinburgh

From the Back Cover
"A fascinating look at how one of the Western world's most iconic literary characters has been appropriated by Arabs as a symbol of secularism, nationalism, or Islamism, depending on the prevailing political mood.Hamlet's Arab Journey is not just a brilliant work of literary analysis--it is a wholly new way of thinking about modern Arab literary and political culture. Indeed, Litvin presents readers with a fresh interpretation of Arab history in the twentieth century, one told through the lens of perhaps the most famous play in the world. This is bold, clever, and fresh scholarship, written in clear and accessible prose, and intended for anyone who cares about the power of literature to transform society--for good or bad."--Reza Aslan, author No god but God and Beyond Fundamentalism

"Presenting a strong and convincing argument, fascinating details, good historical contextualization, and a fast-paced narrative, this engrossing book shows how various productions and manifestations of Hamlet are in conversation with each other and with an enormous range of intellectual and artistic regions in the Arab world. It will reanimate conversations amongst various audiences interested in contemporary Arab cultural creation, the interplay of politics and culture, and of course, Shakespeare."--Marilyn Booth, University of Edinburgh

About the Author
Margaret Litvin is assistant professor of Arabic and comparative literature at Boston University.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
HAMLET'S ARAB JOURNEY
Shakespeare's Prince and Nasser's Ghost By Margaret Litvin
Princeton University Press
Copyright © 2011 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-13780-3
Contents
List of Illustrations..................................................................ixPreface and Acknowledgments............................................................xiNote on Transliteration and Translation................................................xviiIntroduction...........................................................................1"When Shakespeare Travels Abroad"......................................................3The Global Kaleidoscope................................................................6Hamlet and Political Agency............................................................81 Hamlet in the Daily Discourse of Arab Identity.......................................13"Time Out of Joint": Coming to Terms with History......................................16"Shall We Be or Not Be?": Personifying the Group.......................................23"Words, Words, Words": Forging an Identity.............................................29"The Play's the Thing".................................................................332 Nasser's Dramatic Imagination, 1952-64...............................................35Revolutionary Drama....................................................................37Theatre Joins the Battle...............................................................44Shakespeare on the Sidelines...........................................................50Hamlet, 1901-64........................................................................53Beyond Caliban.........................................................................54"Bend Again toward France".............................................................59"Do It, England!"......................................................................70Independence and Soviet Shakespeare....................................................75Bidayr's "Cruel Text"..................................................................854 Hamletizing the Arab Muslim Hero, 1964-67............................................91In Search of Social Justice............................................................93Psychological Interiority as a Ground for Political Agency.............................95Sulayman: "Justice or Oppression? That Is the Puzzle"..................................95Al-Hallaj: "Who Will Give Me a Seeing Sword?"..........................................103De-Hamletized Revivals.................................................................1115 Time Out of Joint, 1967-76...........................................................114"Something Is Rotten": Theatre and the 1967 Defeat.....................................116M artyrs for Justice: "Abstract and Brief Chronicles" of the 1970s.....................124Sadat's Open Door: "To Cook or Not to Cook?"...........................................134A Dilemma..............................................................................1406 Six Plays in Search of a Protagonist, 1976-2002......................................142Silencing Hamlet.......................................................................144"A Play Can't Stab"....................................................................147"His Sword Kept Sticking Up"...........................................................163A Prodigal Cousin......................................................................173Post-Political Laughs..................................................................179Epilogue: Hamlets without Hamlet.......................................................183Notes..................................................................................189Bibliography...........................................................................237Index..................................................................................257
Chapter One
HAMLET IN THE DAI LY DISCOURSE OF ARAB IDENTITY
For educated English speakers, quoting Shakespeare is a natural and effective way to make a point. Shakespeare's works are "misread and misquoted in support of any and every position" in European and American political debate, because "who better than Shakespeare serves as secular scripture in our world today?" As R. A. Foakes puts it:

In the English-speaking world William Shakespeare and his works have an extraordinary status.... [His] cultural authority has paradoxically ensured that Shakespeare has been democratized as a representative consciousness, whose works embody in memorable language much of the wisdom of our civilization. Passages from his plays and poems are frequently cited in all sorts of contexts to support legal or political arguments, validate advertisements, justify prejudices, and generally sanction a whole range of beliefs and opinions.

Less well known is that Shakespeare's plays hold this quasi-sacred status in the Arab world as well. As early as the 1930s, Lebanese writer Mikhail Naimy (Mikhail Nu'ayma) declared, "Shakespeare remains a Ka'ba to which we make pilgrimage and a Qibla to which we turn in prayer." More recently, a columnist in the pan-Arab daily Al-Hayat complained that Arab unity had become just like Shakespeare: "[E]veryone swears by it (al-kull yastashhid biha) ... be it to the point or not." Speakers cite chapter and verse, regardless of how well or badly they know the texts. Whether the target audience is Arab, western, or mixed, Shakespeare is both a staple of daily speech and a rhetorical trump card.

The 2006 "cartoon controversy" illustrates this phenomenon. In January 2006, tempers flared over a Danish newspaper's decision months earlier to run a series of cartoons caricaturing the Prophet Muhammad. Around the world, thousands of commentators felt called either to defend freedom of speech or to lambaste European insensitivity to Muslims. Predictably, dozens of western polemicists lifted a phrase from Hamlet to do it. "Something is rotten outside the state of Denmark," proclaimed European, American, and Arab writers appalled at the violence of some Arab and Muslim responses. "Buy Danish—Nothing Rotten in the State of Denmark!" urged a Belgian newspaper supporting a solidarity campaign. "Rotten Judgment in the State of Denmark," countered a Danish-born political scientist.

If they had noticed, these commentators might have been surprised to see Arab and Muslim editorialists on the other side of the issue paying them back in the same cultural currency. The quotation "Something Is Rotten in the State of Denmark" headlined an article decrying European double standards on religious taboos in the English-language, Saudi-based Arab News. A writer in the Saudi daily Al-Riyadh quoted the phrase in an Arabic column on prejudice against Islam, adding, "And we affirm that the rot is still present in Denmark and several other European countries." And a Jordanian blogger gloated: "Something Is Rotten in the State of Denmark ... and it could be smell of rotting Danish products as a result of the most recently implemented boycotts."

For weeks, commentators on both sides of the issue used the shared idiom of Shakespeare to hurl insults across an increasingly real-looking cultural divide. No one saw any irony in such uses of Hamlet. Unlike Danish havarti cheese, Shakespeare is globalized and naturalized, perceived in the Middle East as a long-ago-successful transplant from Europe rather than as a threatening import. The Denmark quotation seems to have occurred to each writer independently. Some simply wanted to look clever. Others may have realized that invoking Shakespeare, the crown jewel of western civilization, would boost their authority in defending (or questioning) "western values." In most cases the Shakespeare allusion was not explained; readers were expected to recognize it. A month into the controversy, an Internet search combining the terms "something is rotten," "Denmark," and "cartoons" yielded 18,200 hits in English alone.

The rhetorical step to Hamlet from a controversy involving Denmark may seem obvious. Yet the play also recurs in intra-Arab discussions of other events. It is cited more often than any other Shakespeare play (Julius Caesar and The Merchant of Venice are distant seconds) and probably more than any other literary text at all. During nearly every major and minor political crisis touching the Arab world in the past decade, fairly mainstream Arab commentators have expressed their opinions using Hamlet. There are examples referring to September 11, 2001, and its aftermath; the capture of deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein (2003); the killing of Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh (2004); Syria's military withdrawal from Lebanon (2005); Iraq's 2005 constitutional referendum and parliamentary elections (2005);19 FIFA soccer; Arabs' relationship to U.S. president Barack Obama (2009); and antigovernment protests in Tehran (2009). Hamlet has been invoked in reference to more general issues as well: economic development, globalization, women's rights, the future of Iraq, Egyptian democracy (or nondemocracy), the Battle of Badr (624 CE), the Palestine question, the role of Arabs (or Muslims) in the world, and the viability of "the Arab system." These uses range from simple catchphrases to thoughtful, sustained engagements with Shakespeare's text.

It is not only western-educated Europhile intellectuals who cite Hamlet in Arabic. The play is invoked by religious as well as secular figures; by liberals, nationalists, and Islamists; by critics who write in obscure journals; and by cultural authorities who publish in major pan-Arab newspapers or command large satellite television audiences. These speakers may have very little in common besides their use of Hamlet; when they meet, they may not be on speaking terms. For example, Egyptian-born Islamist Shaykh Yusuf al-Qaradawi (Yusuf al-Qaradawi) and Syrian secularist Sadiq Jalal al-Azm (Sadiq Jalal al-'Azm) represent nearly opposite ends of the Arab religio-political spectrum; the confrontation between the two in a late-1990s television debate represented a serious challenge to al-Qaradawi's authority that made him appear unusually defensive and weak. Yet we will shortly see published examples of each of these two men citing Hamlet to argue about the Arabs' or Muslims' place in history. In fact, the two use the play to raise quite similar alarms about the future: Can the Arabs (in al-Azm's case) or the Muslims (in al-Qaradawi's) seize their collective destiny or will they be doomed, like Hamlet, to watch Fortinbras capture the day?

My first aim in this chapter is not to explain why all these Arab speakers invoke Hamlet for political debate (that is partly a historical question for later chapters) but to make sense of how they do so. As we shall see, Arab polemical uses of Hamlet fall into a strikingly simple pattern: Hamlet is most often invoked to argue about a perceived existential threat to a valued collective identity. This pattern tends to draw on four basic themes: nonbeing versus being, madness versus wholeness, sleep versus waking, and talk versus action. Each of these themes hangs on certain key lines from Shakespeare's play; each also resonates with Arab political debates going back at least to the nineteenth century. These polemical deployments of Hamlet are built on both a meaningful relationship with Shakespeare's text and a consistent reading of Arab history.

However, such an "ordinary-language" analysis of Hamlet use will take us only so far. By focusing on sloganized political rhetoric, it leaves aside much of what Shakespeare's Hamlet has offered Arab writers in the past half-century. Our contemporary polemicists tend to emphasize identity and collective fate but overlook Hamlet's tireless writing, rewriting, acting, and directing—activities whose centrality in Hamlet has not escaped Arab adapters. Thus they stress Hamlet's predicament (the danger of erasure from history) but largely ignore the strategies and effects of his response. An analysis of their rhetoric therefore fails to account for the appropriations of Hamlet we will encounter in the next five chapters, all of which engage with the play's literary and theatrical dimensions, sometimes in self-consciously metatheatrical ways. To point the way toward some of these issues, I will conclude this chapter by highlighting how one important writer, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, uses Hamlet to meditate on the possibilities of words and rewriting.

"Time Out of Joint": Coming to Terms with History

It is not difficult to find affinities between Shakespeare's Hamlet and the archetypal Islamist revolutionary of the past fifty years. Like a young salafi, Hamlet loathes drinking (he calls it "swinish"), rails against unchastity, and believes that a "dram of evil" is enough to contaminate a whole person or even nation, however "noble" the remainder. His distrust of social conventions and appearances ("I know not 'seems'"), of unregulated natural and social processes ("things rank and gross in nature"), and particularly things of the flesh (e.g., "O shame, where is thy blush?") suggests a puritanism that wishes nature could be restricted by divine law. He invokes heavenly rewards and the power of prayer, choosing not to kill the kneeling Claudius lest he send him to heaven. He contemplates suicide and finds it theologically incorrect, yet he embraces martyrdom.

However, there is a deeper and more fruitful point of contact between Hamlet and (our stock picture of) the contemporary Islamist: their politics. Both act in ways that respond, albeit sometimes irrationally, to a sense of disempowerment stemming from a profound historical dislocation. Margreta de Grazia has recently drawn attention to the original sin of "dispossession" at the core of Shakespeare's play: a land usurped, an inheritance denied. Hamlet, let down by the system of elective monarchy, would win a democratic election if he could hold one. He faces a ruthless autocratic regime whose informers penetrate even the closest personal relationships (e.g., his relationship with Ophelia). Although allowed to read and talk all he wants, he is soon spied on, locked out of political power, exiled, and nearly executed through a conspiracy between a corrupt monarchy at home and pliant allies abroad. Surrounded by political as well as moral corruption, he is moved to equate the two.

Hamlet's dispossession is part of a larger historical rupture: "the time" itself is "out of joint." Critics, both in the then-Socialist bloc and in the West, have long noted that Hamlet is set at a turning point. Whether one understands the juncture as a transition from medieval chivalric heroism to modern individual moralism, from a hauntingly undead Catholicism to an enforced Protestantism, or even from a feudal society to bourgeois commercialism and Renaissance humanism, Hamlet straddles a cultural shift in which the social and moral system has given way before there is anything solid to replace it. James Shapiro has argued that Hamlet responds to some historical and cultural anxieties of Shakespeare's own time: the irrelevance of chivalry, the uncertain wars in Ireland, and the looming question of who would succeed Queen Elizabeth:

There's a sense in Hamlet no less than in the [late Elizabethan] culture at large of a sea change, of a world that is dead but not yet buried.... Acting as if one still lived in the world of Hamlet's heroic father—where it was possible to win fame through martial feats—was no longer possible. But how to act in the world that had replaced it was not clear, and was part of Hamlet's dilemma.

An aura of nostalgia and loss thus pervades the play. Things have come loose from their moorings. The old moral and political order is gone, but instead of a new one Hamlet finds only "an unweeded garden" (too much nature) or "a prison" (too much culture) run by a fraudulent crew of usurpers, impostors, bawds, sycophants, and spies. Friends deceive; fathers "loose" their daughters. Relationships are unstable. Words are not to be trusted, either. When his father's ghost reappears, Hamlet does not even know by what name or title to call it. While Hamlet is particularly attuned to it, other characters confirm that the malaise affects the kingdom as a whole, not only the melancholy prince. It is Horatio who foresees "some strange eruption to our state," Marcellus who declares that "something is rotten." Even Claudius fully expects Fortinbras to consider Denmark "disjoint and out of frame."

Against this fractured background Hamlet struggles to find an authentic and appropriate way to behave. We can see his struggle as an effort to take ownership of his future: to establish his autonomy, to write his own lines instead of speaking from a script written by others. Seeing through the self-serving platitudes of the new "common" sense, Hamlet seeks a "particular" way of being. To his mother's admonition ("Thou know'st 'tis common: all that lives must die") he responds with withering sarcasm: "Ay madam, it is common." Resisting the various roles thrust upon him by the play's older characters, he seeks instead a part that can "denote [him] truly." Perhaps it is precisely this striving for self-definition that has made Hamlet appear to embody such a distinctly modern concept of the self.

Collective Identity under Threat

In modern Arab political discourse (of which Islamist discourse is just one strand), Hamlet's concerns with agency and authenticity are expanded beyond the individual. Now it is the nation or community struggling to establish its autonomy, write its own lines, and shape its own destiny against the background of a great historical shift or crisis rooted in an act of violent usurpation. While extending Hamlet's concerns, such citations do not pervert them. Collectivizing Hamlet's dilemma simply carries it into the rhetorical mode of nineteenth- and twentieth-century nationalist discourse.

The text that Arab polemicists most often cite from Hamlet is the "to be or not to be" soliloquy, often called "the monologue of Being" (munuluj alkaynuna). But they tend to quote Hamlet's question in the plural: "Shall we be or not be?" (nakun aw la nakun). This rendition takes a liberty offered by the Arabic language. Since Arabic has no infinitive form ("to be," "être," "[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]"), there is no way to ask "to be or not to be" without identifying who is doing the being. Each translator is forced to choose a pronoun. But why choose "we"? None of the major literary translations of Hamlet in Arabic render "to be or not to be" in the plural. Arab actors do not play it in the plural. Only in its life as a political slogan does Hamlet's question have this form.

The link between Hamlet and the Arabs depends on the widely accepted idea that the Arab world (as a whole) is living through a period of painful transition. Both the transition and the pain are usually blamed on the bulldozer force of western-driven modernity. In contrast with the one-time shock typically described by writers in other colonized societies, Arab writers can choose from a long series of historical ruptures. Some date the start of the "out-of-joint time" as far back as the fifteenth-century loss of Muslim Spain; more typical proposed dates are 1798 (Napoleon's expedition to Egypt), 1948 (the founding of Israel), 1967 (the June War), 1991 (the first Gulf War, in which some Arab nations fought against others), or even 2001 (the start of the U.S.-led "war on terror"). Whatever the specific events, the trope remains similar. Confrontations between tradition and modernity and between East and West are among the "perennial themes" in Arabic literature. The collision is seen to produce a radical historical rupture. The rupture in turn leads to an existential crisis, putting the very grounds of a continuous collective identity into question. The question of "to be or not to be" is thus raised, over and over again, in every generation.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from
HAMLET'S ARAB JOURNEY
by
Margaret Litvin
Copyright © 2011 by Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of Princeton University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Read less
Top
About this item
Questions
Reviews
Product details
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Princeton University Press; 1st edition (October 23, 2011)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 296 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0691137803
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0691137803
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.2 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 0.1 x 0.1 x 0.1 inches
Best Sellers Rank: #4,168,232 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
#391 in Middle Eastern Literary Criticism (Books)
#1,527 in Shakespeare Literary Criticism
#3,156 in Shakespeare Dramas & Plays
Customer Reviews: 4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars    2 ratings