A01=Margaret Litvin
Allegory
Allusion
Arab culture
Arabic
Arabic literature
Arabs
Assassination
Author_Margaret Litvin
Bernstein
Bertolt Brecht
Boris Pasternak
Category=DSB
Colonialism
Comparative literature
Criticism
Despair (novel)
Dictatorship
Edward Said
Egyptians
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eq_biography-true-stories
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eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Fitna (word)
Fortinbras
Fourth wall
Gertrude (Hamlet)
Hamlet's Father
Ibid (short story)
Illustration
Irony
Islamism
Jabra Ibrahim Jabra
Jan Kott
Jester
King Lear
Laertes
Laertes (Hamlet)
Literature
Louis Awad
Luigi Pirandello
Martyr
Melodrama
Monologue
Muslim Brotherhood
Narration
Nasserism
Newspaper
Novelist
One Thousand and One Nights
Pantomime
Playwright
Poet
Poetry
Political drama
Political theatre
Polonius
Prose
Protagonist
Rhetoric
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
Satire
Shakespeare's plays
Shakespearean tragedy
Soliloquy
Sulayman Al-Bassam
T. S. Eliot
Tawfiq al-Hakim
The Other Hand
Theatre
Tom Stoppard
Tragedy
Transliteration
William Shakespeare
Writer
Writing
Product details
- ISBN 9780691137803
- Weight: 539g
- Dimensions: 152 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 23 Oct 2011
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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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.
Margaret Litvin is assistant professor of Arabic and comparative literature at Boston University.
