Critical Survey

To my knowledge, this is the first essay collection in any language to be devoted to Arab appropriations of Shakespeare. Studies of international Shakespeare appropriation have mushroomed over the past fifteen to twenty years. Excitement began to build in the 1990s, as several lines of academic inquiry converged. Translation theorists found in Shakespeare’s plays a convenient (because widely known and prestigious) test case. Scholars in performance studies, having noted how sharply local context could influence a play’s staging and interpretation, saw a need to account for ‘intercultural’ performances of Shakespeare in various languages and locales. Marxist scholars became interested in the fetishisation of Shakespeare as a British cultural icon which, in turn, was used to confer cultural legitimacy on the project of capitalist empire-building. Scholars of postcolonial drama and literature explored how the periphery responded. The ‘new Europe’ provided another compelling set of examples. All this scholarship has developed quickly and with a great sense of urgency. Shakespeareans in many countries have contributed. By now there is a rich bibliography on Shakespeare appropriation in India, China, Japan, South Africa, Israel and many countries in Latin America and Eastern and Western Europe.

Sometime around 1890, Romeo and Juliet became the first Shakespeare play translated into Arabic and staged at a public theatre. The classic love story proved exceedingly popular among theatregoers in Cairo, and it remained in the repertory of Iskandar Farah’s theatrical company and its various successors for over twenty years, even while it was simultaneously revived by other troupes. The success of this production has been duly noted. The popularity of Shuhada’ al-Gharam [The Martyrs of Love], as it was known, remains somewhat puzzling, however, since it was in many respects completely foreign to its early Arab audiences who had very little familiarity with Shakespeare, and especially the genre of tragedy. But if it was unfamiliar to them, replete with the melodramatic songs of the fl amboyant pop star Salama Hijazi, and punctuated with comic sketches, recited poetry and cabaret-style music between acts, it would strike Western viewers of Shakespeare as equally exotic.

In a series of satirical narrative articles published in al-Sufur literary weekly in 1920, playwright and theatre critic Muhammad Taymur (1892–1921) describes a play he watched, not in reality, but in a dream. In a humourous style that oscillates between the language of fiction and the language of drama, Taymur elaborates in these articles, entitled ‘Trial of the Playwrights’ (Muhakamat Mu’alifi al- Riwayat al-Tamthiliyya), on the practices of both playwrights and theatre translators at the time. The defendants in this imagined, dream-like trial include such prominent figures as Jurj Abyad, Farah Antun, Ibrahim Ramzi and Lutfi Jum‘a, among others. Significantly, members of the jury were the foreign writers on whose work theatre makers in Egypt drew for their performances. These included Shakespeare, Corneille, Racine and Goethe. The prosecutor was the French playwright Edmund Rostand, whose play Cyrano de Bergerac was very popular among Egyptian theatregoers at the time. Two of the defendants, Farah Antun and Khalil Mutran, were known to have practised theatre translation and were thus tried on that basis. Farah Antun was found guilty of ‘translation malpractice’. According to the prosecutor in this imaginary trial, Antun ‘picked the old vaudeville plays and rendered them in a strange, astounding and distorted translation that is half colloquial, half classical, and mixed it with some Syrian jokes … to make the audience laugh’ (77). For this commercially oriented translation practice, the jury ordered Antun to suspend his translation activity for ten years to allow the Egyptian audience enough time to forget his uninspiring translations. But as for Khalil Mutran (1872–1949), the renowned poet and Shakespeare translator, the jury only blamed him for not producing enough of his translations of Shakespeare’s drama (84).

A corpus of plays related to Shakespeare has developed within the newly established genre of drama in Morocco since its independence in 1956. Most of these dramas are part of the process of constructing Moroccan cultural/theatrical identity. The various Shakespearean manifestations are, indeed, attempts to make a theatrical space by altering or reproducing the Shakespearean myth. However, in order to conceive of Moroccan dramatic texts related to Shakespeare as cultural utterances, we must read them with and within the parameters of a series of overlapping discursive contexts. These contexts, as I hope to demonstrate, create the conditions within which these hybridized texts take on their complex cultural signifi cation.

A scorpion, its poisonous tail torn out, runs desperate circles around a piece of burning coal. A small boy sits in front of a screen, watching a film of a play translated from one language he does not understand into another. Twenty-five years later, these two events – an upper- Egyptian game, a Russian film of an English play – coalesce into a one-act play called Dance of the Scorpions, an Arabic-language offshoot of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. This, at any rate, is the simple etiology offered by the offshoot play’s creator, Egyptian playwright/ director Mahmoud Aboudoma. Let me summarise Aboudoma’s offshoot play and two versions of his first Shakespeare encounter before pointing to the larger questions these stories help to frame. This article will then make a start at addressing those questions.

Last March, a well-known Tunisian critic wondered about the motivations that had led Mohamed Driss, the head of the Tunisian National Theatre and one of the greatest directors in the country, to direct a Shakespeare play: What is today the purpose of reproducing a Shakespearean tragedy, when all over the world directors are desperately searching for new creative ways, new means for attracting a public who is more and more disinterested by the theatre?

On Saturday 19 March, 2005, Omar Ahmed Abdullah Ali tidied his workstation at Qatar Petroleum and shut down his computer for the last time. There were very few people in the offi ce that day, and none of them noticed anything unusual about his behaviour. They recalled him afterwards as ‘a decent man’, a family man whose wife had, only a month before, given birth to their third child. Earlier that morning the 38-year old Egyptian computer programmer had said goodbye to Umm Abdullah and his three children quite normally, as if nothing unusual were about to occur. I am not what I am. Now he left the offi ce quietly, unassumingly, attracting no attention, and went to collect his black Land Cruiser from the company car park. Driving slowly and carefully, he pulled the car onto the road and headed towards the Doha suburb of Fariq Kalaib.

Richard III is one of Shakespeare’s best-known characters, a familiarity independent of the history plays, Henry VI and Richard III, in which he appears. This celebrity has less to do with Richard’s historical reputation, and more with the way in which great actors of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries gave the role status and popular visibility, particularly perhaps via Laurence Olivier’s 1955 film version. Just as Hamlet is automatically identifi able by black suit and prop skull, Richard is immediately recognisable by his legendary deformity (mandatory hump, optional limp), and by the famous opening line of his initial soliloquy: ‘Now is the winter of our discontent’.

The Violin MATT SIMPSON

Conversation in a Mirror Why There’s An Irish Gelateria On Via Vittorio RUTH O’CALLAGHAN

Merda D’Artista RICHARD KELL

If I were Prince of Liechtenstein ROGER CALDWELL

The Wrong Jarrow by Tom Kelly (Middlesbrough: Smokestack Books, 2006), 52 pp, ISBN 0-95510-617-6, £7.95

Wall by Ellen Phethean (Middlesbrough: Smokestack Books, 2006), 156 pp, ISBN 0-95510-616-8, £7.95

Notes on contributors