Hamlet’s Arab Journey: Shakespeare’s Prince and Nasser’s Ghost (review)

In Hamlet’s Arab Journey: Shakespeare’s Prince and Nasser’s Ghost, Margaret Litvin examines the overall discursive structures that conditioned the production, circulation, and reception of Hamlet in the Arab world over the past decades. Hamlet’s journey through the Arab world is marked by the political rhetoric of “to be or not to be,” which has become a defining slogan in Arab politics used by different types of communities. The lack of the infinitive form “to be” in Arabic further complicates the condition of “foreignness” that the statement implies. Litvin’s fresh reading unfolds the underlying histories that helped to bring Hamlet into sharper focus for Arab readers. Her timely and keen examination shows that there are compelling reasons to believe that the Arab Hamlet has been refashioned with a great sense of urgency to reflect ironically on Arab conditions. Hamlet’s Arab Journey delves deeper into the question of Arab identity and its inexorable concern with historical agency at given transitional periods.

For Litvin, Hamlet “encapsulates a debate coeval with the largely constitutive of modern Arab identity: the problem of self-determination and authenticity” (2). Her reflection goes beyond Frantz Fanon’s postcolonial denials where binary relationships between colonized and colonizer, local and global, East and West dissolve and become more and more interwoven, and focuses more on the middle ground of performativity. She explores the Hamlet currency in today’s Arab political lexicon. The urgency of the crisis leads Arabs to read “to be or not to be” as a representation of collective loss and bewilderment. Litvin’s model of literary appropriation, or the “global kaleidoscope” as she calls it, allows a persistent circulation and construction of different Hamlets all the time, rather than reproducing the original. She is more interested in how Hamlet is deployed, rather than to what extent Arab versions are faithful to the original. After all, the constant refashioning of Shakespearean texts is, indeed, informed by the mythos that surrounds them. A comparative reading of Hamlet’s soliloquy as it appears in two different quartos illustrates the multiplicity (rather than the uniqueness) of the Shakespearean text—a text that is constantly edited, revised, and presented as a pattern of self-erasing traces rather than an authentic script that claims presence. Arab Hamlet negotiations, then, are part of the struggle to make space and refashioning of the self through the “detour” of the other. In this vein, Shakespeare’s representation on the Arab stage amounts to a portrait of the self. In Litvin’s much needed revision, Hamlet negotiations are no longer part of a resistance to Western “masks of difference,” or the Prospero-Caliban model of postcolonial writing-back. Beyond postcolonial appropriations, Litvin’s articulate argument underlines the politics of “Hamletization of the Arab Muslim political hero” in favor of the prevailing tendency of an “Arabization of Hamlet” (90).

Litvin’s journey begins from Egypt in 1952 with Gamal Ab del Nasser’s geopolitical and cultural attributes allowing an array of Hamlets to reflect on collective identity and historical agency. She succeeds to a great extent in demonstrating that Nasser’s Hamlets are rituals of empowerment fueled by a unified ideology and a full-fledged counterculture highly sensitive to pan-Arabism, which emerged as a painful process of renewal that grew out of attribution and contention, a postcolonial struggle affected by violent taxonomic labeling and conflicting aspirations for a better future. Theater was at the heart of this counterculture, strictly defining itself as the theater that thinks for the emerging Arab nation. Political satire became a favorable frame in Arab theater, a breakthrough in both subject matter and style.

Litvin demonstrates that the Hamlet productions before the 1967 Arab defeat produced a romantic national hero. Since the 1970s Hamlet has been read as a play about tyranny as dreams of pan-Arab unity faded. Hamlet became inarticulate, unable to fix the “out of joint” world around him. He becomes a...