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Reviewed by:
  • Hamlet’s Arab Journey: Shakespeare’s Prince and Nasser’s Ghost by Margaret Litvin
  • Muhammad Siddiq (bio)
Hamlet’s Arab Journey: Shakespeare’s Prince and Nasser’s Ghost. By Margaret Litvin. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011. xviii + 269 pp. Cloth $37.50.

Its intriguing title and subtitle momentarily aside, the overarching objective of this study is to trace and canvass the permutations of Hamlet—perhaps Shakespeare’s best known and most problematic play—across the broad geographic expanse of the Arab world, over a century of fascinated, often intense dramatic, intellectual, and political interrogation and appropriation. By any reasonable criteria, this is a challenging, if not outright daunting undertaking. The panoptic geo-historical perspective adopted in the study is further complicated by the proliferation of recognizable Hamlet(ian) themes, motifs, collocations, and associations across the entire spectrum of Arab literary, intellectual, political, and polemical discourse. Regardless of whether one accepts the implicit assumption of an Arab obsession with the hapless Danish prince, albeit in his distinctly Arab guise, the outcome is not in question. Litvin’s is a fascinating account of the Hamlet specter, as it traverses, in various Arabic translations and mutations, one Arab stage after another, ignoring all artificial boundaries between the hokey Arab “nation-states” that constitute the equally decrepit and dysfunctional Arab League.

Notably absent from the list of Arab states in which different versions of “Arab” Hamlet have been staged is Saudi Arabia, (and, by extension, the other Gulf states, under stifling Saudi tutelage). By way of logical inference, could this dividing line also demarcate a far more significant boundary between those Arab states, and societies, willing to engage modernity, however shyly and tentatively, in the person of an “Arab” Hamlet, and those led by arch-reactionary Saudi Arabia? It requires no special skill to observe how avidly the latter devour the material benefits of modernity even as they shun, on grounds of presumed moral and cultural superiority, all traffic with the intellectual and philosophical principles that underpin the very project of modernity.

Obviously, what matters most here, I mean in both Hamlet and modernity, is the fundamental and undeniable right, or rather imperative, to question. After all, in whatever translation, appropriation, or staging, Hamlet would hardly be recognizable if he is denied the right to think and to question. If this is indeed the case, could the admission of Hamlet, in his “Arab” or any other casting, also serve as a litmus test for the minimal degree of accountability required for a viable modern civil society (and state), in the Arab world as elsewhere? These musings seem to cohere with “the spirit” of Litvin’s study even if, technically, her argument follows in the footsteps of Hamlet and can thus go only where he goes. [End Page 181]

As with other national literatures and cultures in other parts of the world, the interest in Shakespeare in modern Arab culture is primarily literary, specifically theatrical, in nature. What is perhaps peculiar to modern Arabic literature and culture is the frequent embedding of extra-literary—ideological, political, social—import in most literary texts, irrespective of author, place, or genre. The direct, live, and relatively unmediated contact with the audience makes the theater particularly amenable to the effective transmission of the text’s “message” and the realization of what Litvin calls “the agency” of the dramatized text. As she amply shows, hardly any staging of Hamlet in Arabic is devoid of such extra-literary, discursive—if not outright tendentious—signification.

This fact lends some credibility to the study’s attempt to establish a symbiotic relationship between the “Arab” Hamlet syndrome, on the one hand, and, on the other, the historical, though unmistakably romantic, inchoate, and ultimately floundering ideology and project of Arab nationalism, especially as bodied forth in Nasser’s person, ideology, rule, and legacy, during the second half of the twentieth century. The multiple roles in which Nasser is cast in this scenario stretch the modicum of plausibility to a breaking point: now he is nationalist and patriotic Caesar rebelling (on stage) against the British occupier of Egypt; now Hamlet the son bent on avenging the wrongful death of his father at the...

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