Hamlet's Arab Journey: Shakespeare's Prince and Nasser's Ghost by Margaret Litvin (review)

Why would Arabs choose Hamlet, a character frequently taken to embody a quintessentially Western deliberative rationality, to define their collective identity and articulate their political aspirations? The answer to this complex question, according to Margaret Litvin, is not to be found in the postcolonial arguments commonly used to explain Shakespearean appropriation in developing nations. In fact, Arab Hamlets often have little to do with Western culture at all. When Arabs adapt, rewrite, comment on, and otherwise invoke Shakespeare they are not automatically responding to a former colonizer; instead, they are addressing an array of more parochial domestic issues. Arab appropriations of Shakespeare are not produced and consumed within an anonymous global village, but in an ensemble of more familiar local communities.

Given Litvin's central premise, her impressive study is concerned not only with telling the fascinating story of Arabs' engagement with Hamlet in the mid- to late twentieth century, but also with adopting a theoretical vocabulary to make sense of Shakespearean appropriation more generally, especially in situations where ordinary postcolonial explanations are inappropriate or misleading. To get beyond the colonizer / colonized binary and other static models of literary influence, Litvin suggests Arab adaptations of Hamlet take place within a "global kaleidoscope" where appropriations of Shakespeare are undertaken "in active dialogue with a diverse array of readings that precede and surround it" (2, 6). That is, each of these adaptations is localized in ways that are best addressed by understanding the specific political, cultural, and aesthetic horizon in which they are created and received. Litvin's model effectively shifts the emphasis away from the Shakespeare text and onto the indigenous conversations in which these works participate.

This shift in focus is essential in the Middle East, where Hamlet is often only dimly understood by his appropriators, and where a complex and multivalent play is often reduced to a pastiche of quotations. Lines from Hamlet such as "Something is rotten," "The time is out of joint," and of course "To be or not to be" (1.4.90, 1.5.188, 3.1.55)¹ are suitably vague enough to resonate with numerous political or social movements, allowing Hamlet to stand in for a particular group—any particular group, be it the Arab community as a whole, a particular nation, or a religious sect. The iconic Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918-70) showed no particular interest in Shakespeare—despite playing Julius Caesar in a 1935 high school production—but clearly grasped the potential of the theater as political propaganda. According to Litvin, Nasser used the spectacle of theater to fashion himself into a larger-than-life dramatic hero. By encouraging political drama that actively supported the revolutionary goals he championed and sought to embody, Nasser had a profound impact on the future of the Arabic theater and on the evolving shapes of Arab Hamlet. Nasser's patronage of a nationalist theater helped later playwrights and directors envision the possibilities for Hamlet as political commentary.

Before looking at the more polemical Hamlets that emerged in the 1960s and after, Litvin in chapter 3 glances at the prehistory of these controversial appropriations. Unlike Western critics, writers, and translators, Arabs were never troubled by an adaptation's fidelity to an original source (and therefore were not talking back to a core from a postcolonial periphery) because they rarely relied on original sources when working with this (and many other) Shakespeare plays. The first Arabic production of Hamlet, by Tanyus 'Abdu, was a "musical with a happy ending" in prose (64) adapted from a French translation that was more interested in showcasing the talents of "Qur'an chanter-turned-singer" Shaykh Salama Higazi (61) than in exploring the title character's psychological turmoil. The popularity of this production cast a long shadow on Arabic Hamlets, even when British productions, more reliable Arabic translations, and even Soviet influences jostled for position.

The next three chapters trace the...