Shakespeare and the Arab World 9781789202601

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Illustrations
Introduction: Katherine Hennessey and Margaret Litvin
Part I Critical Approaches & Translation Strategies
Chapter 1 Vanishing Intertexts in the Arab Hamlet Tradition
Chapter 2 Decommercialising Shakespeare: Mutran’s Translation of Othello
Chapter 3 On Translating Shakespeare’s Sonnets into Arabic
Chapter 4 The Quest for the Sonnet: The Origins of the Sonnet in Arabic Poetry
Chapter 5 Egypt between Two Shakespeare Quadricentennials 1964–2016 Reflective Remarks in Three Snapshots
Part II Adaptation & Performance
Chapter 6 The Taming of the Tigress: Faṭima Rushdī and the First Performance of Shrew in Arabic
Chapter 7 The Tunisian Stage: Shakespeare’s Part in Question
Chapter 8 Beyond Colonial Tropes: Two Productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Palestine
Chapter 9 Bringing Lebanon’s Civil War Home to Anglophone Literature: Alameddine’s Appropriation of Shakespeare’s Tragedies
Chapter 10 An Arabian Night with Swedish Direction: Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Egypt and Sweden, 2003
Chapter 11 ‘Rudely Interrupted’ Shakespeare and Terrorism
Chapter 12 Othello in Oman: Aḥmad al-Izkī’s Fusion of Shakespeare and Classical Arab Epic
Chapter 13 ‘Abd al-Raḥīm Kamāl’s Dahsha: An Upper Egyptian Lear
Chapter 14 Ophelia Is Not Dead at 50 An Interview with Nabyl Lahlou
Index

Citation preview

Shakespeare

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the Arab World

Shakespeare

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Series Editors: Graham Holderness, University of Hertfordshire Bryan Loughrey Volume 5 Shakespeare & the Ethics of War Edited by Patrick Gray Volume 4 Shakespeare & Creative Criticism Edited by Rob Conkie and Scott Maisano Volume 3 Shakespeare & the Arab World Edited by Katherine Hennessey and Margaret Litvin Volume 2 Shakespeare & Commemoration Edited by Clara Calvo and Ton Hoenselaars Volume 1 Shakespeare & Stratford Edited by Katherine Scheil

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Shakespeare the Arab World

Edited by Katherine Hennessey

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Margaret Litvin

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

Published in 2019 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2019 Berghahn Books Originally published in two special issues of Critical Survey, volume 19, number 3, and volume 28, number 3. All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hennessey, Katherine, 1976– editor of compilation. | Litvin, Margaret, 1974– editor of compilation. Title: Shakespeare and the Arab world / edited by Katherine Hennessey and Margaret Litvin. Description: New York : Berghahn Books, 2019. | Series: Shakespeare and | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2019019811 (print) | LCCN 2019021785 (ebook) | ISBN 9781789202601 (ebook) | ISBN 9781789202588 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781789202595 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Translations into Arabic—History and criticism. | Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616— Stage history. | Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Influence. | Translating and interpreting—Arab countries—History. | English literature—Translations into Arabic—History and criticism. Classification: LCC PR2881.5.A73 (ebook) | LCC PR2881.5.A73 S53 2019 (print) | DDC 822.3/3—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019019811 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-78920-258-8 hardback ISBN 978-1-78920-259-5 paperback ISBN 978-1-78920-260-1 ebook

& Contents List of Illustrations Introduction

Katherine Hennessey and Margaret Litvin

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I. Critical Approaches and Translation Strategies Chapter 1 Vanishing Intertexts in the Arab Hamlet Tradition

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Margaret Litvin

Chapter 235 Decommercialising Shakespeare Mutran’s Translation of Othello Sameh F. Hanna

Chapter 3 On Translating Shakespeare’s Sonnets into Arabic

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Chapter 4 The Quest for the Sonnet

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Mohamed Enani

The Origins of the Sonnet in Arabic Poetry Kamal Abu-Deeb

Chapter 5 102 Egypt between Two Shakespeare Quadricentennials 1964–2016 Reflective Remarks in Three Snapshots Hazem Azmy

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II. Adaptation and Performance Chapter 6 The Taming of the Tigress

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Faṭima Rushdī and the First Performance of Shrew in Arabic David C. Moberly

Chapter 7140 The Tunisian Stage Shakespeare’s Part in Question Rafik Darragi

Chapter 8 Beyond Colonial Tropes

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Two Productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Palestine Samer al-Saber

Chapter 9 172 Bringing Lebanon’s Civil War Home to Anglophone Literature Alameddine’s Appropriation of Shakespeare’s Tragedies Yousef Awad

Chapter 10 An Arabian Night with Swedish Direction

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Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Egypt and Sweden, 2003 Robert Lyons

Chapter 11197 ‘Rudely Interrupted’ Shakespeare and Terrorism Graham Holderness and Bryan Loughrey

Chapter 12 Othello in Oman

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Chapter 13 ʿAbd al-Raḥīm Kamāl’s Dahsha

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Chapter 14 Ophelia Is Not Dead at 50

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Index

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Aḥmad al-Izkī’s Fusion of Shakespeare and Classical Arab Epic Katherine Hennessey

An Upper Egyptian Lear Noha Mohamad Mohamad Ibraheem

An Interview with Nabyl Lahlou Khalid Amine

& List of Illustrations 5.1. Rashad Rushdi.

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5.2. The state and its intellectuals: Nasser decorating Tawfiq al-Hakim with the Order of the Republic in a picture dated 17 December 1958.

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5.3. The quest for a father: Ahmed Shafik during the BBC Arabic interview.

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5.4. ‘The other half of society’: women army volunteers during the 1956 Suez War.

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5.5. Lubna Abdelaziz and Rushdy Abaza in the 1962 film Ah Min Hawa’.114 8.1. A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1995).

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8.2. A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2011).

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12.1. Royal Opera House Muscat.

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12.2. Nineteenth-century Egyptian depiction of Antar and Abla.

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12.3 and 12.4. Al-Layla al-Ḥālika in performance: Othello and Antar.220

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12.5. Al-Layla al-Ḥālika in performance: Abla.

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12.6. A Bedouin tent projected onto a screen behind the actors playing Antar, his father and his uncle.

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12.7. Al-Layla al-Ḥālika in performance: Iago in silhouette.

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13.1. Yaḥyā al-Fakharānī as Bāsil in the gīla (scorching sand) scene in Dahsha.235 13.2. Apex of tragedy in Dahsha: Bāsil laments over the dead body of his beloved daughter Niʿma, surrounded by the corpses of massacred peasants.

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14.1. Ophelia Is Not Dead, Tangier, 14 April 2016.

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14.2. Ophelia Is Not Dead, 2016. Set design.

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14.3. Nadia Niazi in Ophelia Is Not Dead, 2016.

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Introduction Katherine Hennessey and Margaret Litvin

What – besides the boring fact that no one has ever published one – justifies a volume surveying the Arab afterlives of William Shakespeare’s work? Besides putting the Arab world once and for all ‘on the map’ of global Shakespeare studies, we hope that the essays in this book provoke you to think in new ways about Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets, about Arabic literature and Arab culture, and about the way a literary adapter negotiates the demands of his or her source material, cultural milieu and audience. In its broad strokes, the history of Shakespeare translation and adaptation in the Arab world resembles that of most non-­anglophone Shakespeare traditions, including many in Latin America and ­Eastern Europe. Shakespeare’s plays have been known to Arab audiences since the late nineteenth century. They entered through French, not as literary works but as script fodder for the Egyptian stage, where francophone Syro-Lebanese immigrants adapted Shakespeare’s tragedies to suit the tastes and theatregoing habits of a rapidly emerging urban middle class. Next followed a ­modernist Notes for this section begin on page 9.

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phase of ever-more-literary translations that served a nationalist modernizing project and fetishized fidelity to the ‘original’ English texts. In the postcolonial period, these highbrow translations and stiff National Theatre performances gradually made room for a simultaneous flowering of more varied, localized, transnationally attuned, ironic and politically sharpened uses of Shakespeare. So far, so typical. It is only in the twenty-first century that the Arab Shakespeare tradition has faced pressures different from those shaping other peripheral or postcolonial theatre contexts: mainly, the sharp expansion of worldwide interest in Arab cultural production spurred by such events as the September 11 attacks, the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq, and the ‘Arab Spring’ uprisings of 2011. This has added a globalized dimension, creating a new world market for Arabic literature and theatre including Arab adaptations of Shakespeare. The scholarly community, too, has shown a growing interest in Arab Shakespeares. Before 2001, scholars of Arabic literature and drama were mainly passive participants in the fast-growing conversation around ‘foreign’, international or ‘global’ Shakespeare. Though aware of the edited volumes and major congresses on international Shakespeare adaptation, scholars of Arabic were seldom represented there. Studies written in Arabic on Shakespeare reception were not translated. In English, a handful of articles and dissertations represented the field. When scholars occasionally brought ‘Arab Shakespeare’ to their colleagues’ attention, they presented it almost as a novelty. Often they did not hesitate to draw easy laughs by invoking the old legend or joke that Shakespeare was really a crypto-Arab, ‘Shaykh Zubayr’.1 However, this situation has changed rapidly since the mid-2000s, as academic and theatre-world interest have fed each other. In 2006 and 2007 the World Shakespeare Congress and the Royal Shakespeare Company, respectively, welcomed their first contributions by Arab playwrights. In anglophone academia today, the curators of any Shakespeare festival, edited volume or university course with ‘global’ aspirations work hard to secure a contribution from an Arab perspective. They can now draw on several monographs2 as well as articles by the contributors of this volume and a few other scholars.3 Even a few translations of plays have seen the light.4 In 2007, Sulayman Al-Bassam’s adaptation of Richard III became the first Arabic play to be commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare

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Company. By 2012, thanks largely to the RSC’s then-associate director Deborah Shaw, several Arab productions were commissioned as part of the World Shakespeare Festival timed for that summer’s Olympic Games in London. Arab institutions have also re-entered the arena. At the worldwide festivities marking the quadricentennial of Shakespeare’s death in 2016, for instance, one of the most ambitious events was organized by the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Alexandria, Egypt.5 In these years the region itself has been an inexhaustible source of drama and, alas, tragedy. The Arab uprisings of 2011, consumed as spectacle, brought the cable network CNN the highest viewer ratings in its history.6 As the Grand Mechanism swung around once more, recent struggles in Egypt, Libya, Syria, Iraq and Yemen (and their repercussions in Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria) have presented dramatic instances of eloquence, pathos, heroism and carnage. Syria’s civil war and the resulting wave of Arabic-speaking refugees into surrounding countries and Europe has lent a sudden, urgent power to once dusty or over-the-top violent classic texts, from Homer and Greek tragedy to Shakespeare. Arab theatre artists seeking to metabolize recent Arab-world events in or for the West have turned persistently to Shakespeare – both from personal interest and in quest of a vocabulary their audiences (and sponsors) can understand. As state support for theatre has crumbled in many Arab countries, Shakespeare provides what Al-Bassam has called a ‘playable surface’, a slippery but usable platform on which an internationally mobile Arab artist can continue to produce work.7 In response, artists have adapted both their texts and themselves. (Many Arab critics and scholars, fleeing abroad for safety or better working conditions, have done the same.) Topical new Shakespeare adaptations have probed the US occupation of Iraq (Al-Bassam’s Richard III: An Arab Tragedy, 2007); the wellsprings of political repression and revolt (his The Speaker’s Progress, 2011–12); Sunni–Shi‘a sectarian strife in Iraq and the rise of extremist Sunni movements (Monadhil Daood’s Romeo and Juliet in Baghdad, 2012); and the threat of recurring tyranny in post-uprising Tunisia (Anissa Daoud and Lofti Achour’s Macbeth – Leila and Ben: A Bloody History, 2012).8 Still more recently, Nawar Bulbul’s two projects in Jordan’s Zaatari refugee camp have cast Syrian children in versions of King Lear/Hamlet (2014) and Romeo and Juliet (2015), appealing to international journalists desperate for signs of hope.9 Coming full circle,

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Arabic Shakespeare has even inspired work by non-Arab anglophone artists such as Irish director Padraig Downey, Cornell University drama professor Rebekah Maggor, and the California-based Arabian Shakespeare Festival.10 But what about ‘local’ Arab writers and directors, those who neither travel nor find international donors and audiences? Some Shakespeare adaptations, such as the Upper Egypt-themed Lear TV series analysed in this book, do target a relatively homogenous audience within one country. Yet as the contributions in this volume make clear, one cannot draw a clear line between ‘global’ and ‘local’ Arab Shakespeares. From the very early twentieth century, trans­ lations into Arabic have been commissioned with one eye on Europe. Directors have reworked ideas picked up at international festivals or from Arab and international travelling companies. Moreover, some productions have regional rather than local or global significance. (An example is the Othello-Antar hybrid analysed in this volume, an Omani play produced for Gulf Arab consumption.) Whether pur­ suing audiences ‘at home’ or abroad, whether seeking to civilize the audience or float to fame on its expectations, any Arab artist who works with Shakespeare does so with a purpose. That has always been true but is perhaps most evident today. In the twenty-first-­ century artistic climate of state withdrawal from the arts, festivalization, unpredictable funding, distracted audiences, self- and official censorship and rising social stigma around the artistic professions in some Arab countries (not to mention the major security concerns that have made it hard to keep theatres open at all), any decision to work with a canonical world source such as Shakespeare is taken strategically, for a reason; such work rewards analysis. Perhaps more so in our out-of-joint times than ever before, ‘Arab’ and ‘western’ cultures have been constructed as mutually defining opposites, making a whole range of ‘cross-cultural encounters’ inevitable. Even while questioning the underlying binarism and pointing out its fairly recent emergence, this volume aims to pluck some ‘trans-cultural’ fruit from it. This book thus offers a variety of perspectives on the history and role of Arab Shakespeare translation, production, adaptation and criticism. With work going back to the earliest days of the Arab Shakespeare tradition, we have avoided an exclusive and ahistorical focus on the contemporary. We have also striven for balance between internationally and locally focused Arab/ic Shakespeare appropriations, and between Shakespeare’s

Introduction

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plays and sonnets. In addition to Egyptian and Palestinian theatre and public culture, our contributors examine everything from an Omani performance in Qatar and an Upper Egyptian television series to the origin of the sonnets and an English-language novel about the Lebanese civil war. They address works produced in ­several languages: literary Arabic (fuṣḥā), Egyptian colloquial Arabic (‘ammiyya), Moroccan colloquial Arabic (darija), Swedish, French and English. They include veteran scholars, directors and translators as well as emerging scholars from diverse disciplinary and geographic locations, a testament to the vibrancy of this field. We have divided the articles into two sections. The first section, ‘Critical Approaches and Translation Strategies’, lays out key theoretical concepts and influential critical approaches to the study of Arab Shakespeares and explores the challenges Shakespeare’s work poses to the region’s translators. The section opens with a chapter by Margaret Litvin, who proposes a conceptual model for Shakespeare appropriation: a ‘global kaleidoscope’ of sources, influences and possibilities, including not just the ‘original’ text and context, but also a wide variety of translations, allusions, literary traditions, and theatrical and cinematic representations, some of which may be hidden intertexts not visible on the surface of an Arab (or other) Shakespeare offshoot at all.11 Sameh F. Hanna examines the 1912 Othello translation by Lebanese-­born poet Khalil Mutran (1872–1949). Fusing Shakespeare with Arab high culture (and removing objectionable references to religion and politics), Mutran’s translation supported a pan-Arab political agenda. Hanna carefully examines Mutran’s interpolations and revisions and analyses the enduring legacy of his translations, some of which (including Othello) remain in print today. Two contrasting essays by celebrated scholar-translators Mohamed Enani and Kamal Abu-Deeb address an understudied topic: the Arabic routes (and, possibly, roots) of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Enani, a celebrated Egyptian scholar and critic and prolific translator, analyses the daunting puzzles that Shakespeare’s verse poses for dedicated Arabic language translators, generously offering a glimpse into his own intellectual process and an explication of the (often ingenious) solutions he came up with for his recently published complete translation (2016). Abu-Deeb, whose own complete Sonnets were published in 2011, investigates the historical evolution of the sonnet form. In the

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i­ntroduction to his translation, which he rewrote in English for the special issue that became this volume, Abu-Deeb lays out an argument not only that the sonnet has its roots in the Arab poetic form called the muwashshaḥ, but also that the polyglot Sicilian court of Frederick II (1194–1250) was the forum in which poet Giacomo da Lentini, father of the ­Italian sonnet, might have heard, adopted and adapted Arabic poetry of this type. The section concludes with a chapter by our late friend and colleague Hazem Azmy (1968–2018), who brought his perspective as a scholar, teacher, dramaturge and theatre critic to bear on a suggestive reading of the Egyptian nationalist project. His analysis is framed between Shakespeare’s two quadricentennials: the birth anniversary of 1964 (which also saw the founding of the iconic monthly journal al-Masraḥ) and the death anniversary commemorated in 2016. Through a Shakespearean lens, Azmy traces the rollercoaster of the Egyptian political and literary scene over those decades from postcolonial hope and euphoria to the more anxious and ambivalent present. The book’s second section, ‘Adaptations and Performances’, focuses on specific instances of Shakespearean adaptation and appropriation from across the Arabic-speaking world – from Morocco to Palestine, and from Egypt to Oman, in genres ranging from the novel to theatre to film and television, arranged in (loosely) chronological order. It opens with an exploration of Egyptian actress Faṭima ­Rushdī’s groundbreaking production and performance of The Taming of the Shrew in Egypt in 1930. As David C. Moberly argues, Rushdī’s controversial decision to use a translation into Egyptian colloquial Arabic rather than erudite fuṣḥā allowed nonelite audiences access to Shakespeare’s play; the production helped propel Rushdī to stardom, and the colloquial script loomed like a giantess over subsequent translations. Rafik Darragi analyses three adaptations – Richard III, Othello and Romeo and Juliet – produced between 1984 and 2007 by prominent Tunisian directors Mohamed Kouka, Tawfiq Al Jibali and Mohamed Driss. Drawing on interviews with the directors as well as his longtime personal involvement in the Tunisian dramatic and literary scene, Darragi traces the varying subtexts that Tunisian directors and audiences have found in Shakespeare’s plays. Samer al-Saber contrasts two productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Ramallah (1995 and 2011) to test the hypothesis that ‘the

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Shakespeare–Palestine relationship has outgrown some colonial binaries’. Interviews with key Palestinian theatre practitioners and with the German partners of Palestine’s first BA programme in ­theatre, and al-Saber’s own experience of directing the 2011 production, illustrate the complexities of Shakespeare’s postcolonial legacy, and the joys and challenges Shakespeare’s texts offer to established and aspiring theatre-makers in Palestine. While most of our contributors focus on performance, Shakespeare is present in Arab fiction as well. Yousef Awad provides an example from anglophone Arab literature, showing how Lebanon’s civil war and Shakespearean tragedy both haunt two twenty-first-­ century novels by Lebanese-American writer Rabih Alameddine. Ventriloquizing Shakespeare’s Lear and Macbeth, Awad suggests, allows Alameddine’s characters to speak truths about the horrors of the civil war that are repressed in public discourse elsewhere, using a literary vocabulary that resonates with his anglophone readership. Picking up on some of the threads from Awad’s article, Robert Lyons analyses the impact of the US-led invasion of Iraq on a joint Swedish-Egyptian production of Midsummer Night’s Dream directed by Eva Bergman in 2003. Lyons argues that the performance – an early and carefully conceived instance of Arab-European Shakespeare collaboration – became for cast and crew a means of cultural resistance to the war, and of demonstrating their solidarity with its victims. Bryan Loughrey and Graham Holderness confront a contemporary comedy-turned-tragedy in the Gulf: a 2005 production of Twelfth Night in Doha, Qatar, cut short by a suicide bomb that killed its amateur director, Jonathan Adams. Juxtaposing jihadist screeds and the recollections of surviving members of the Doha Players with analysis of Shakespeare’s text, Holderness and Loughrey offer not so much a formal study of ‘Shakespeare and Terrorism’ as a deeply empathetic meditation on both the irresponsibility of innocence and the self-defeat of excessive literalism. Katherine Hennessey turns to a location less commonly represented in studies of Arab Shakespeare. Taking a recent play from Oman – The Dark Night, a dramatic mash-up of Othello and pre-­ Islamic epic – she explores the author’s goals and strategies in fusing these surprisingly similar source texts. She argues that the 2010 performance at the Gulf Youth Theatre Festival in Qatar, and its afterlife online as a Digital Theatre project, have functioned as a

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coded condemnation of racism, sectarianism and autocracy within the Gulf – one that reproduces some aspects of the sultanate’s official ideology while subverting others. Moving from stage to (small) screen, Noha Ibraheem examines a 2014 Ramadan television series that resituates King Lear in early twentieth-century Upper Egypt. Her analysis highlights the adapters’ clever use of local signifiers and Shakespearean analogues to intervene in contemporary debates about Egyptian social norms. A striking irony emerges from this analysis and its focus on filial (im)piety: celebrated actor Yaḥyā al-Fakharānī suggested the Lear adaptation, believing that the theme of ungrateful children would resonate with Egyptian audiences, and then played the title role under the direction of his son Shādī, who reportedly made his father walk barefoot on scorching sand while filming the storm scene. Finally, Khalid Amine’s interview with Moroccan playwright Nabyl Lahlou illuminates a long-running Shakespeare adaptation, Ophelia Is Not Dead, developed from the vantage points of post-1968 France and post/colonial Morocco. One clarification on our scope. This collection includes both ‘Arab’ and ‘Arabic’ Shakespeare, exploring work both by people of Arab ethnic background (wherever they live and whatever languages they write) and Shakespeare adaptations in the Arabic language, whatever the ethnicity of the adapters. In exploring these over­ lapping categories, we certainly do not wish to suggest the existence of such a thing as ‘The Arab Shakespeare’ or even a single unified Arab Shakespeare tradition. As the chapters in this volume abundantly demonstrate, the variety of Arab Shakespeares over the past 150 years has been rich and strange, in dialogue with a v­ ariety of intertexts from French, Russian, Italian and other literatures and media cultures. Some of the works analysed here have more in common with non-Arab/ic analogues than with each other. We hope that studying their complex historical roots and cultural backgrounds will lead you to insights not only about Arab/ic literary and theatre cultures but also about the unlikely yet apparently unending project of Shakespeare adaptation as such.

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Notes 1. See, e.g., M.M. Badawi, ‘Shakespeare and the Arabs’, Cairo Studies in English (1963/1966): 181–96, originally presented to the British Shakespeare Society on the occasion of the quadricentennial of Shakespeare’s birth. Badawi begins his talk with this ‘theory’. Usually invoked in jest, it holds that Shakespeare was actually an Arab Muslim living in Britain. Among the ‘evidence’ are Shakespeare’s full lips and ‘Islamic’ beard; his many treatments of mistaken or doubtful identity; and his allegedly unflattering views of Jews, Turks and Englishmen (supposedly clear in The Merchant of Venice, Othello and the history plays). This joke’s persistence, mainly in the West, suggests that it taps into some real intercultural anxiety. For a unique variation, see Wole Soyinka, ‘Shakespeare and the Living Dramatist’, in Art, Dialogue, and Outrage: Essays on Literature and Culture (New York: Pantheon, 1993), 207-11. 2. Margaret Litvin, Hamlet’s Arab Journey: Shakespeare’s Prince and Nasser’s Ghost (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011); Sameh Hanna, Bourdieu in Translation Studies: The Socio-cultural Dynamics of Shakespeare Translation in Egypt (New York: Routledge, 2016); and Katherine Hennessey, Shakespeare on the Arabian Peninsula (New York: Palgrave, 2018). 3. See, e.g., Margaret Litvin, Avraham Oz and Parviz Partovi, ‘Middle Eastern Shakespeare’, in The Shakespearean World, ed. Jill L. Levenson and Robert Ormsby, 1st ed. (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2017), 97-115; and the following by Katherine ­Hennessey: ‘Shakespeare and the Arab World’, in A Companion to Global Shakespeares, ed. Alexa Alice Joubin (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, forthcoming); ‘William Shakespeare: Worlds Here, There and Elsewhere’, in A Companion to World Literature, ed. Christine Chism and Ken Seigneurie (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, forthcoming); and ‘Shylock in the Hadramawt? Adaptations of Shakespeare on the Yemeni Stage’, ArabLit 3, no. 5 (2013), pp. 5-24. See also the entries on Arab topics by Margaret Litvin and Rafik Darragi, Noha Ibraheem, Yvette Khoury, and Katherine Hennessey in the forthcoming Stanford Global Shakespeare Encyclopedia, ed. Patricia Parker (Stanford: Stanford University Press, online). Useful older articles include Ferial Ghazoul, ‘The Arabization of ­Othello’, Comparative Literature 50, no. 1 (1998): 1–31; and Mahmoud F. Al-­ Shetawi, ‘Hamlet in Arabic’, Journal of Intercultural Studies 20, no. 1 (1999): 43–63. 4. See, e.g., the MIT Global Shakespeares Video and Performance Archive (https:// globalshakespeares.mit.edu/, accessed 19 February 2019), the anthology Four Arab Hamlet Plays, edited by Marvin Carlson and Margaret Litvin with Joy Arab (New York: Martin E. Segal Theatre Centre Publications, 2016), and Sulayman Al-Bassam, The Arab Shakespeare Trilogy (London: Methuen, 2014). 5. See http://www.bibalex.org/BAShakespeare400/en/Home/Index.aspx (accessed 19 February 2019). 6. David Bauder, ‘CNN Hopes Egypt Ratings Mark Start of Turnaround’, Associated Press, 11 February 2011. 7. Margaret Litvin, ‘For the Record: Interview with Sulayman Al-Bassam’, in Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation, ed. Alexa Huang and Elizabeth Rivlin (New York: Palgrave, 2014), 221–40.

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8. See Al-Bassam, The Arab Shakespeare Trilogy; and Margaret Litvin, Saffron Walkling and Raphael Cormack, ‘Full of Noises: When “World Shakespeare” Met the “Arab Spring”’, Shakespeare 12, no. 3 (2016): 300–315. 9. For media coverage, see, e.g., Ben Hubbard, ‘Behind Barbed Wire, Shakespeare Inspires a Cast of Young Syrians’, The New York Times, 31 March 2014. 10. Maggor adapted and directed Litvin’s translation of Hamlet Wakes Up Late by Syrian playwright Mamduh Adwan at Cornell University in November 2017. Downey directed Al-Bassam’s Al Hamlet Summit at DUCTAC Theatre, Dubai, in November 2017. On the Arabian Shakespeare Festival, see https://www.facebook. com/ArabianShakespeareFestival/ and https://www.theatrius.com/2017/11/08/ hamlet-fights-for-justice-at-arabian-shakespeare-festival-s-f/ (accessed 17 January 2019). 11. For an application of this model outside the Arab context, see Margaret Litvin, ‘Multilateral Reception: Three Lessons from the Arab Hamlet Tradition’, Middle Eastern Literatures 20, no. 1 (2017): 51–63.

Part I Critical Approaches

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Translation Strategies

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Vanishing Intertexts in the Arab Hamlet Tradition Margaret Litvin

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.1 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.2 Aboudoma’s play, Dance of the Scorpions, is part of an Arab Hamlet tradition that has produced countless citations, allusions, adaptations and other intertextual appropriations in the past half-century. ­Written Notes for this section begin on page 29.

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in the 1980s, it was performed in Egypt in 1989 and 1991.3 Its five characters carry Shakespearean names: Hamlet, Horatio, Claudius, Polonius and the Ghost. However, many Shakespearean ingredients are altered or absent. There are only five scenes, no Gertrude or Ophelia, no Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, no ­Players, no metaphysics and no poetry.4 Aboudoma’s unimpressive protagonist is not eloquent and lacks any deep (‘Hamletian’) sense of consciousness. Instead, the play offers a sharp meditation on misgovernment: Horatio becomes a folksy narrator and double agent; a council of nobles is staged as a puppet show with life-sized dolls; and an ambiguous ending shows a group of domestic revolutionaries mounting a successful coup (Polonius escapes).5 Arguably the central character is Claudius, the ‘scorpion’ of the title: an unapologetic tyrant who conspires with foreign enemy Fortinbras, rigging a fake war to sideline his political opponents and defraud his people. Were it not for the familiar character names, a Western reader or spectator might not have recognised this play as a version of Hamlet at all. An Arab playgoer might have found Aboudoma’s play surprising as well, but for a wholly different reason. The play departs from an Arab theatrical convention, typical of 1960s criticism and early 1970s stage productions, of portraying Hamlet as a political hero, a seeker of justice brutally martyred by an oppressive regime. I have termed this type of protagonist ‘the Arab hero Hamlet’.6 Aware that the ‘time is out of joint’, he makes every effort ‘to set it right’.7 As one scholar has observed: With the exception of early productions of Hamlet (e.g., [an 1893 adaptation]), Hamlet has always been viewed as a romantic hero who sets out to fight corruption, and dies for the cause of justice.8

In sharp contrast to this archetype, Aboudoma’s Hamlet is naïve and spineless, always a few steps behind. Other characters mock him. Even the Ghost does not recognise him at first: ‘Are you Hamlet?’ he verifies (114). This departure from the norm is flagged for the audience in the play’s opening moments: Aboudoma’s Horatio, welcoming the audience like a hakawati (traditional Arab storyteller), announces that he has been telling Hamlet’s story ‘for five centuries, until I got bored with telling it the same way every night. So I will try to tell it to you tonight in a different form’ (113). Thus one of the main Brechtian tricks driving Aboudoma’s play – its dramatic irony – depends on his audience’s background familiarity with (a stock Arab interpretation of ) Shakespeare’s Hamlet.



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Already we can see that Aboudoma’s rewriting, rather than simply engaging with Shakespeare’s Hamlet, engages with a whole tradition of Hamlet appropriations. Nor is that Hamlet tradition limited to earlier Arabic adaptations and interpretations. Rather, it draws on what I would like to call a ‘global kaleidoscope’ of sources and models. In the early period, French translations and Italian styles played a formative role in Arab Shakespeare translation and staging (a point stressed by Hanna’s essay in this collection). Of course, colonial education and the anglophone Shakespeare industry (Lambs’ Tales from Shakespeare, A.C. Bradley, Laurence Olivier etc.) also figured prominently. But for Aboudoma’s generation, writers who came of age during the postcolonial period and the Cold War, those British and Western European sources were already in the background. More impressive and perhaps more influential were Soviet and Eastern European models, which showed how Shakespeare could be simultaneously highbrow and topical. In an email exchange in 2002, Aboudoma traced his acquaintance with Shakespeare as follows: I have not read [Shakespeare’s Hamlet] in English at all, as my English does not allow me to understand it. But when I was young, I saw a Russian black and white film: it was Gamlet, with no Arabic subtitles.9 I saw this film more than 10 times, like a deaf young man. The first time I read Hamlet it was in Muhammad Hassan al-Zayyat’s translation,10 with a big introduction. At that time I had not heard about Tom Stoppard’s play [Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead]. I had no idea about versions [of a play] or [even] what the word means. I spent part of my life in Upper Egypt, where I came from. In my childhood I saw some people catching a big scorpion and pulling out its tail, which was full of poison, and they put the scorpion beside the fire (a round piece of charcoal). The circumcised scorpion started to turn around the fire, the people were laughing and singing for him, ‘Dance, dance, dance.’ The scorpion turned faster and faster until it threw itself inside the fire. They call this game ‘The Dance of the Scorpion’. This image lived in my memory up till now. Concerning the discourse of the play, it is as if you are listening to a polyphonic piece of music, but you pull out all the [accompanying] instruments and just feel the core, I mean the song, which is hidden inside the piece itself. So [in writing my play] I depended on the major tones to realise the song. For me Hamlet is a political song, so I depended on the motivations of the game, the intersection of the dreams.11

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The Shakespeare source Aboudoma emphasises is Grigorii Kozintsev’s film Gamlet (1964).12 His stylised description of his viewing experience (‘more than 10 times’, ‘like a deaf young man’) conveys how formative he considers it. He later understands what versions are, and he seeks out additional information – a translation, a scholarly introduction, other readings and rewritings – to further mediate his encounter with Shakespeare’s text. But Kozintsev’s interpretation remains decisive. When the former ‘deaf young man’ contemplates the music of Hamlet, he hears a political tune. In a recent autobiographical short story, ‘Gamlet is Russian for Hamlet’, Aboudoma fills in some of the political context that frames his encounter with Shakespeare.13 The short story, in a collection entitled Nostalgia, describes Nikita Khrushchev’s May 1964 visit to Cairo through the eyes of a small boy. (The Soviet Premier was in town to celebrate the completion of the first phase of the Aswan High Dam project.14 Aboudoma, born in 1953, would have been nearly eleven at the time.) After watching Gamal Abdel Nasser and Khrushchev hold hands in a parade, the boy stumbles into the Russian Club at the very end of a showing of Kozintsev’s Gamlet. Fascinated, he comes back the next night to see it in full. On the way out, a man in the doorway hands him an Arabic translation of the play (‘for free’) and tells him to come back often. Aboudoma’s prose captures the hope and innocence of the moment: the air full of exhilarating slogans (‘the great nationalist dream, justice, the alliance of working people’s forces, the fight against colonialism, the Egyptianization of culture, and the rockets pointed toward Israel’, 38); Russian officers in the streets; the Russian greetings he learns at school; the sword fight on the cinema screen; the long plait of the little blue-eyed Russian girl (‘in my head, I was looking for one line of a pretty love story’, 40–1) in the seat next to him. Of course, the point is to underscore Egypt’s loss of innocence in the post-Nasser period: the abandonment of socialist ideals, Anwar Sadat’s peace with Israel and turn toward the West, and more recently U.S.-dominated globalisation. Aboudoma’s first meeting with Shakespeare represents a magical window, now closed. In the story’s last paragraph, the narrator complains that ‘the tree has abandoned its roots’ (41). The Russian Club where he saw the film has vanished, its banner replaced by ‘another sign, also red, showing a picture of a man smiling for no reason and the words Kentucky Fried Chicken’ (42).15



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Aboudoma’s reception and rewriting of Hamlet highlight three facts that will be central to my argument. (1) Aboudoma’s encounter with Shakespeare’s Hamlet is mediated by other texts. He has never read Shakespeare’s text in any ‘original’ English version, and only belatedly comes to a full Arabic text. Rather, he receives Shakespeare through a ‘global kaleidoscope’ of sources and models. (2) Geopolitical factors and local cultural politics help determine which facets of the kaleidoscope gain particular prominence in a given place/time. Aboudoma’s first mediating text happens to be a Soviet film, Grigorii Kozintsev’s Gamlet. Other Soviet and Eastern European models were significant for other writers and artists in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world. (3) Yet Aboudoma is free to revise the Hamlet he inherits. His late1980s play sends a political message of his own choosing; it does so precisely by playing off his audience’s expectations of a heroic Hamlet. Retaining Kozintsev’s film’s emphasis on tyranny and the quest for justice, Aboudoma transposes its thundering ‘political song’ into a minor key. As we will see, reception and appropriation histories like Aboudoma’s (and of course, every Arab rewriter has his or her own history of Shakespeare encounters) cannot be generalised into a predictive theory. But they do illuminate a rich and multifaceted Arab Hamlet tradition. More broadly, they help flesh out the idea of ‘local Shakespeare’, illustrating some actual mechanisms by which local priorities and options intersect with Shakespeare’s texts.16 And they let us at least ask the question about appropriation studies: why would a scholar ever imagine that there could be a direct bilateral relationship between an ‘original’ text and a later writer’s ‘response’? If the point illustrated here (about the complexity and mediatedness of the relationship between Shakespeare’s text and its Arab rewriter) is as obvious as it seems, then why and under what circumstances do certain intertexts become invisible?

The Global Kaleidoscope Since about 1990, scholars of international Shakespeare appropriation have sought ‘a theory of cultural exchange that might help us

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understand what happens when Shakespeare travels abroad’.17 The paradigm of ‘influence’ is clearly inadequate: it overprivileges the influencer and denies the agency of the influencee. It thus fails to explain why different writers take different things from Shakespeare and bring different things to him (and why many writers familiar with Shakespeare do not appropriate his texts at all). But subsequent explanations, for all their professed desire to ‘provincialise Europe’,18 have not moved past the basic idea of a binary relationship between original texts and rewritings. A still prevalent model, that of anticolonial rewriting, posits a  straightforward statement–response (or dominant–resistant) relationship between an authoritative original and the rewriter who challenges or inverts it.19 This pattern serves well for cases in which nationalist writers in the colonies do in fact ‘write back’ to the metropole – e.g., the Martinican poet Aimé Césaire’s Une Tempête (1968), or, in a different vein, the Egyptian poet Ahmad Shawqi’s Tragedy of Cleopatra (1927).20 However, the postcolonial model has two well known flaws. First, it reinscribes the same conceptual dichotomy that it aims to critique (albeit while drawing attention to it, at least).21 Second, and worse, it is helpless before the many cases where the theatre or literature that borrows from Shakespeare ‘is not anti-­ colonial’, does not seek to subvert anything in particular, and, as Ania Loomba notes, is actually not interested in Shakespeare at all, except as a suitably weighty means through which it can negotiate its own future, shake off its own cramps, revise its own traditions, and expand its own performative styles.22

Approaching such works is a challenge. If the former coloniser is not the implicit addressee, then who is?23 If Shakespeare appropriation is not an ‘aggressive binary action’, then what is it about?24 Recently globalisation has seemed to replace postcolonialism as the mot clef – but so far without unlocking new insights about who tends to borrow what from Shakespeare, when, why and how. Tired with all these, some talented scholars have called for ‘more supple and comprehensive theories of cross-cultural Shakespeare encounters’ (ibid.). They have meanwhile returned to the working notion that what shapes a given community’s engagement with a foreign text are the specific talents and interests of local writers, theatre-makers and audiences. This has produced some rich and sensitive scholarship



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on ‘local Shakespeares’, but it provides no framework for integrating larger historical currents back into the analysis. This article proposes a new approach to Shakespeare appropriation based on the observed relevance of a global kaleidoscope of sources and models. This approach would begin with the fact that each rereading and rewriting is created in active dialogue with a diverse array of readings that precede and surround it. It would attend to the contextual factors that help condition both the way an Arab appropriator receives and interprets Hamlet and, later, the shape of the new version he or she ultimately produces. (The ‘global kaleidoscope’ model is itself in dialogue with Bakhtin’s ‘dialogical’ speech appropriated from a web of previous speech, H.R. Jauss’s idea of a dialectical question–answer relationship between context and text, and Paul Friedrich’s notion of a ‘parallax’ in which the gifted individual language user negotiates and in turn helps reshape surrounding norms of grammar and culture.25 Bourdieu’s ‘regulated improvisations’ are surely in the background as well.26) The first phase to notice is the reception. As Mahmoud Aboudoma’s story shows, it is unrealistic to assume a direct bilateral relationship between ‘original’ and ‘rewriter’. Reception is rarely direct. Aboudoma and other Arab writers (and, I would argue, most writers in any language) do not first encounter Hamlet just by sitting down and reading it. In general, the reception of a prestigious foreign literary work never entails a tabula rasa, a direct, unmediated relationship with an authoritative original. (The more prestigious the work, perhaps, the more mediated the encounter.) It is thus important to examine the kaleidoscope of indirect experiences – school assignments, abridged versions, stage productions, films, translations, critical articles, conversations, literary allusions and other materials – that offer the raw materials for an Arab appropriator’s refashioning of Hamlet. These experiences come from multiple cultural traditions (not just the ‘original’ source culture) and arrive in various languages. They offer conflicting interpretations that require sorting out. Some experiences reshape the text itself: to cite an extreme example, a writer who had read only Jean-François Ducis’ French version (first published 1770)27 would know Hamlet as a play with a decisive hero and a happy ending.28 Other experiences, such as reading Jan Kott’s Shakespeare Our Contemporary, work by grinding the lenses through which the appropriator views any version of the text. Most

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­ hakespeare experiences do both, in subtle ways: for example, the S Boris Pasternak translation of Hamlet used for Kozintsev’s film re-edits the text somewhat; for viewers who do not know Russian, however, the main effect is to superimpose Pasternak’s sonorous poetic cadences on whichever edition of Shakespeare’s play they eventually do read or see. Already we begin to get a sense of the background to any particular act of Shakespeare appropriation: a complex three-way dialogue between a text, a gifted individual rewriter, and his or her surrounding culture. Of course, political and other historical circumstances help determine which facets of the kaleidoscope gain prominence at certain times. Foreign relations, domestic preoccupations and local cultural predilections make certain versions more readily available or more relevant. The rewriter may/must choose what to be influenced by, but only from the material available. Perhaps a good analogue is a pop music ensemble choosing its ‘influences’. After forming an idea of the received text, the appropriator can choose whether and how to ‘sample’ or ‘orchestrate’ that text for an artistic and/or polemical purpose. Options include quasiliteral reproduction, political allegory, poetic meditation, parody, ironic quotation or allusion, sloganisation etc. This is a second phase of free decision within a limited sphere of possibilities. While open to imaginative play, the choice is circumscribed by audience considerations: what would resonate culturally and pay off politically. Each generation’s reception and reinterpretation in turn becomes part of the kaleidoscope for the generation that follows. Unlike postcolonial appropriation theory, the global kaleidoscope model does not claim to generalise about the purpose of rewriting a respected literary work or to predict the direction that such a rewriting might take. Instead, its main virtue is to provide a framework (a set of questions) within which to consider the individual rewriter’s imbrication in a multifaceted and dynamic tradition of Shakespeare use. In particular, it draws attention to the great variety of actual sources through which an appropriator acquires a ‘source’ text. Thus it can help extricate Shakespeare appropriation studies from the vexed and self-reproducing dichotomy variously termed dominant/ subversive, original/rewriting, empire/colony, centre/periphery and West/East.



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The Arab Hamlet tradition The case of Arab Hamlet appropriation illustrates the model’s usefulness. For one thing, the Arab Hamlet differs somewhat from the cases of Arab Antony and Cleopatra, Othello, and The Merchant of Venice, which have all, for obvious reasons of plot, attracted more explicitly anticolonial rewritings.29 (However, most Arab Othello offshoots have instead focused on jealousy and gender violence.30) Hamlet is also not part of a second group of Shakespeare plays, those that have been shown or claimed to possess elements of Arab or Middle Eastern origin.31 It heads the third and largest group of Shakespeare plays, those for which most Arab critics have not raised the issue of Occidental or Oriental identity at all. Other major plays in this group include King Lear, Richard III and Julius Caesar – also, incidentally, plays that feature autocracies and their problems. Already this shows the futility of trying to generalise about the way Shakespeare will function in a given cultural context. Different plays, due to their particular resonances with local circumstances, are perceived and deployed very differently. Further, Hamlet’s reception history contravenes the postcolonial model. The play did not arrive in the Arab world only or mainly through Britain’s colonisation of Egypt. Nor was Shakespeare’s work presented as a single, colonially imposed, authoritative set of texts. Certainly there were British schools with obligatory English classes and schoolboy abridgements in both English and Arabic; the Lambs’ Tales from Shakespeare were translated at the turn of the twentieth century.32 But the first knowledge of Shakespeare came through stage versions influenced by French and Italian theatrical conventions. There were French-mediated translations with neo­ classical happy endings (as mentioned above), travelling productions and films,33 and Arab and translated literary criticism. After 1952 the Arab world’s turn toward socialism led to extensive cultural exchange with the Eastern bloc, opening the door to Soviet and Eastern European artistic models. Egyptian, Syrian and other Arab students who pursued advanced degrees abroad (in Moscow, Sofia, Berlin, Prague, Budapest, Paris, Rome, London or various American cities) returned with books and ideas. Thus, influential versions of ‘Shakespeare’ came from Britain but also from France and Italy, the

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United States, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Moreover, as the global kaleidoscope model would predict, younger Arab Hamlet appropriators have responded to their own times and also to the Hamlets popularised by their elders. Starting out as a prestigious foreign import, Prince Hamlet has become a fixture in the domestic political conversation of Egyptians, Syrians and other Arabs, and a vehicle for expressing their criticisms of and hopes for their societies. His famous question, which speechmakers and journalists tend to translate as ‘Shall we be or not be?’, has become the chosen phrase for the most pressing existential question of Arab identity.34 Adaptations of the play have also responded to this question. While the postcolonial Arab conversation about Hamlet has always centred on justice and political agency, its emphasis has shifted over the past half-century. We can identify three main phases of postcolonial Hamlet appropriation in the Arab Near East:35 (1) In the period of Nasserist revolutionary optimism (roughly 1952–1967), Hamlet served mainly as a ‘classic’ text to be mastered, a piece of ‘world-class’ theatre whose competent performance could testify that ‘the Arab nation’ deserved a prominent role on the world stage.36 The character of Hamlet served in this period as an emblem of interiorised subjectivity and psychological depth; Egyptian dramatists endowed their protagonists with recognisably Hamletian thought and speech patterns as a shorthand for their status as fully fledged moral subjects and hence credible political agents.37 (2) After the complete Arab military defeat in the June War of 1967 and especially after Nasser’s death in 1970, Arab writers came to believe that a leading role on the world stage had to be seized rather than earned. Hamlet thus became an Arab revolutionary hero, a martyr for justice meant to mobilise audiences against the Claudius-like domestic tyrants whose corruption and in­ difference were blamed for the defeat. Hamlet’s contemplative side lost importance; the most successful productions played him as a Che Guevara in doublet-and-hose.38 (3) But that effort, too, quickly hit a dead end. Egyptian, Syrian and Iraqi dramatists of the past thirty years (since about 1977) have instead deployed Hamlet for dramatic irony. Their predecessors’ hero-Hamlet has become a foil for pointedly inarticulate and



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ineffectual protagonists, including Aboudoma’s in Dance of the Scorpions. The only really empowering role available, these bitter plays suggest, is the power to set oneself above one’s circumstances through ironic laughter.39

Kozintsev’s Gamlet Although the dominant Arab staging of Hamlet did not shift from contemplative to revolutionary until 1970, an important seed of that reimagining was planted in 1964, when Grigorii Kozintsev’s Gamlet arrived in Egypt.40 The film is indeed, as Aboudoma says, ‘a political song’. Downplaying the Hamlet–Gertrude relationship and the problem of delay, it focuses instead on the relationship between human decency and brute power. Claudius is a bull of a man, self-­ satisfied and cruel.41 Hamlet’s moral and political struggle against the Claudius dictatorship leaves little room for doubt. His soliloquies are sharply cut; the most self-searching ones are omitted entirely.42 The first soliloquy (‘O that this too too sullied flesh would melt’, I.ii.129ff ) is trimmed (no talk of incest) and played in voice-over, with Hamlet walking silently through a crowded room as a stream of conformists rushes past in the opposite direction. After its first appearance (a black shadow with a billowing cloak, announced by an urgent low-brass-and-tympani motif ) the Ghost literally haunts Hamlet’s mind; the decisive and fiercely angry young man seems to see his father everywhere. Hamlet’s blazing eyes and wind-blown hair announce his inner turmoil. The only break from the prison of Denmark is the crashing sea. Kozintsev’s Gamlet was produced in response to a uniquely Soviet set of concerns.43 Epitomising Soviet society’s disenchantment after the bitter revelations of the Khrushchevian thaw, the film became ‘a symbol for the decade’ of the Soviet 1960s.44 But while its presence in Cairo was due to Soviet and Egyptian cultural policies, Gamlet’s resonance in Egypt had more to do with the mood on the ground. Some communist-leaning intellectuals saw the film soon after their release from Nasser’s prisons, where they had spent several years after a crackdown on political dissent in the late 1950s. Others were prepared by Egyptian theatre and film: the revolutionary agit-prop style of the 1950s had given way to regime-critical political allegory by the 1960s, but both tendencies placed stories about power into immediate dialogue with the regime. In Egypt, any portrayal of

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an autocratic leader – whether a Pharaoh, a Mamluke, a fairy-tale Sultan as in Tawfik al-Hakim’s The Sultan’s Dilemma (1960), or a drug pusher as in Mikhail Ruman’s Smoke (1962) – was instantly construed as a reference to Nasser.45 Such an audience could not have missed the police state iconography of Kozintsev’s film: eavesdroppers, armed guards, ubiquitous portraits and busts of Claudius. It was prepared to note the concrete sociological reality (fawning courtiers, war-torn villages, the toiling peasants turning the drawbridge in the opening scene, the ragged poverty of the Players) underlying the film’s intricate web of visual symbols and musical motifs. All this combined with heartrending performances by Innokenty Smoktunovsky (Hamlet) and Anastasia Vertinskaya (Ophelia), as well as Shostakovich’s rousing score, to make the film a lasting sensation in Egypt. The film was shown many times starting in 1964: at Russian clubs (as Aboudoma recalls), at Cairo’s Odeon cinema, and later on television, with subtitles pirated from a 1960 Arabic translation by Jabra Ibrahim Jabra.46 It became a public event. A 1965 meeting of Cairo’s Theatre Club where it was discussed drew an astonishing seven hundred attendees.47 A recent reminiscence by Egyptian literary critic Gabir ‘Asfur reveals that viewing it was not only a private revelation (as Aboudoma describes) but also a widely discussed communal experience: I cannot forget to mention the Russian film based on Hamlet, which joined exceptional direction with splendid music and riveting performances, especially the genius Russian actor who played Hamlet, as well as the actress who played Ophelia, who captured the delicacy and innocence and then the madness that led to her suicide. And I have not forgotten how much I enjoyed the rhythms of the poetic sentences pronounced by the actors in the Russian film – and no wonder, as the film depended on the poetic translation by Russian poet and novelist Boris Pasternak, author of the famous Doctor Zhivago and winner of the Nobel Prize, who translated several Shakespearean tragedies. Therefore we appreciatively enjoyed the poetic rhythm of the Russian language in the actors’ mouths, despite our lack of comprehension of it.48

A generation older than Aboudoma, Asfur knew other Hamlet versions before Gamlet. He refers to ‘several translations’ (unable to recall which he read first) and mentions other films, including Laurence Olivier’s (1948) and later Franco Zeffirelli’s, starring Mel Gibson (1990). Yet he vividly recalls, more than thirty-five years later,



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how he and his peers responded to the Pasternak translation and the Kozintsev film.

A Contested Golden Age Even the multifaceted global kaleidoscope is only a beginning. There is more: each of the multiple source texts through which Shakespeare is received will itself be interpreted and assimilated in multiple ways, and its meaning may be further revised in retrospect. Here again, the reception of Kozintsev’s film in Cairo is a good example. For Mahmoud Aboudoma, as we have seen, 1964 represents a golden age of principled politics. Egypt still knew what it stood for; its pursuit of Nasser’s socialist goals was, in Hamlet’s phrase, ‘unmix’d with baser matter’ (I.v.104). Yet Aboudoma’s description of Gamlet itself superimposes some later doubts about this revolutionary single-mindedness. One terse paragraph of his short story ‘Gamlet is Russian for Hamlet’ suffices to convey the child narrator’s memory of the plot (and his confusion because someone had told him the film was about the Battle of Stalingrad): They turned out the lights and the show began. This time I saw the film from the beginning. It was about revenge for the father whom death had taken from the world. The mother was corrupt, and the uncle was corrupt, and the minister was corrupt, and maybe the absent father was corrupt too. But his son was as confused as a prophet, though one without a scripture. As I sat there waiting for the epic of the World War or at least to hear the word Stalingrad, I read on the screen the most beautiful phrase, which stuck in my heart from then on: ‘Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.’ (41)

At the heart of a black-and-white story about principled resistance and craven pragmatism, this plot summary hints at a problem: Hamlet may be a prophet ‘without a scripture’. His cause – his father’s cause – may be without merit. Of course, this summary misremembers Kozintsev’s film in some ways.49 It does so by incorporating ­Aboudoma’s own later take on Hamlet, and perhaps his later disillusion with Nasserism. Both are more apparent in Aboudoma’s offshoot play. In Dance of the Scorpions, rot and corruption are indeed everywhere. But Abouduma’s babbling and blubbering Hamlet is a far cry from Smoktunovsky’s charismatic man of principle. This Hamlet

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does see himself as a prophet, a Saviour rejected by his people (117). But in a pivotal scene he learns that his creed – the sacred memory of his father – is as hollow as the pieties mouthed by the hypocritical Claudius regime: Hamlet: Yes! He was more virtuous than all the kings in the world … My father was pure and untouched, but you contaminate everything. Claudius: Does that make you feel better? Yes, he was pure and clean, and you don’t want anyone to tell you the truth. You always went out of your way to find someone who would mislead you. I suppose you haven’t heard anything and have not seen fit to follow the news of the war. Hamlet: What war? If this is true, then the war is over. If this is true, then for whom did I waste those days sitting and planning revenge? Was it for nothing? (Looks confused) Father. Answer me, for the sake of my humiliated pride. Everyone was on the right path except Hamlet. Everyone said, ‘Do it, Hamlet.’ Do it. But what should I do when everything has become just words? Revenge is words and war is words … Words, words, words won’t heal the wound (139–40).

A recent essay by Aboudoma’s near-contemporary, Egyptian-­ British novelist Ahdaf Soueif, assimilates Kozintsev’s Gamlet into a quite different matrix of political priorities. Here too, Hamlet reception is invoked to eulogise a mid-1960s golden age which has disappeared – and in whose historical authenticity the narrator has an enormous stake. However, Soueif (born in 1950) recalls not revolutionary slogans and ‘rockets pointed toward Israel’ but just the opposite, a moment in which the politics of Arab identity did not dominate Arab life. She sketches a happy hybrid space, ‘Mezzaterra’, where cultures met and mingled; in this vision, the Russian and Soviet ingredients were just a natural part of the mix: Growing up Egyptian in the Sixties meant growing up Muslim/Christian/Egyptian/Arab/African/Mediterranean/Non-Aligned/Socialist but happy with small-scale capitalism … . In Cairo on any one night you could go to see an Arabic, English, French, Italian or Russian film. One week the Russian Hamlet was playing at Cinema Odeon, Christopher Plummer’s [BBC film] Hamlet at Cinema Qasr el-Nil, and Karam Mutawi’s Hamlet at the Egyptian National Theatre … . We saw ourselves as occupying a ground common to both Arab and Western culture, Russian culture was in there too, and Indian, and a lot of



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South America. The question of identity as something that needed to be defined and defended did not occupy us … . Looking back, I imagine our Sixties identity as a spacious meeting point, a common ground with avenues into the rich hinterlands of many traditions.50

Soueif ’s 2005 reminiscence, self-conscious and gently ironic (‘looking back, I imagine’), is nonetheless sincere. In the context of an impassioned call for global ‘unity of conscience’ (21) and a mass migration to the common ground (23), she perhaps cannot afford to question the extent to which this common ground ever really existed.51 Instead, as a kind of secular scripture, she invokes her kaleidoscopic memory of Hamlet. The play is Soueif’s only example of a cultural object at the happy crossroads of cultures. The ‘Russian Hamlet’ she cites is of course Kozintsev’s film.

Vanishing Intertexts We have seen how Kozintsev’s interpretation of Hamlet (itself mediated through Pasternak and other sources) became part of the Egyptian cultural landscape in the mid-1960s. Elsewhere in the Arab world, directors and writers readily identify other Soviet and Eastern Bloc models and interlocutors. Syrian director Riyad Ismat’s account of his swashbuckling 1973 Hamlet adaptation invokes Jan Kott’s Shakespeare Our Contemporary, among other models.52 In the introduction to his bitter and hilarious political satire Forget Hamlet (2000), Iraqi playwright Jawad al-Assadi invokes Heiner Müller’s Hamletmaschine and Yuri Lyubimov’s 1971 Hamlet at the Taganka (starring the Russian antiestablishment icon Vladimir Vysotsky).53 Examples could be multiplied. So if such mediating texts are so obvious and seminal, why is it sometimes so difficult for critics and scholars to consider them? One reason may be an intertextual anxiety that drives critics to abstract from an intervening interpretive tradition, instead imagining a direct relationship between contemporary author and venerated source text. A sort of high-cultural fundamentalism, this approach strives to show that a given reading is directly available from – hence authorized by – Shakespeare’s text. For instance, in her introduction to Aboudoma’s play, Egyptian critic Nehad Selaiha treats Dance of the Scorpions as a direct binary engagement with Shakespeare’s Hamlet, not as an intervention in an ongoing inter­ national tradition of Hamlet reworking:

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Mahmoud Aboudoma does not use Hamlet as a vehicle on which to load new, external meanings, meanings not found in the original text; rather, he abbreviates the original text to one of its dimensions, namely the political dimension, and focuses on it, interprets it; and his imagination plays in it, calling on some of the imperceptible signs that he notices in the pleats of the text, and then explodes it from inside (30).

Selaiha insists that Aboudoma does not ‘load new, external meanings’ on Hamlet: his play is an authentic interpretation or exegesis of Shakespeare’s ‘original text’ (or one of its dimensions).54 This argument aims to defend Aboudoma from charges of misappropriating Shakespeare’s symbolic capital. It is not irrelevant: the rewriter surely wants his audience to admire the cleverness of his engagement with Shakespeare, or else why would he use the familiar Shakespearean names at all? But, as we have seen, it leaves out part of the story. I think there is something more specific at work here. Most observers today tend to overlook Eastern Bloc contributions to modern Arab culture. The Soviet Union’s collapse did not erase the legacy of Russian and Eastern European cultural influences, but it shifted the political ground and diverted the attention of scholars and writers. In the 1990s and 2000s, despite all the talk of a ‘new cold war’ with the Arab or Muslim world, the literary legacy of the old Cold War was largely forgotten.55 The dominant rhetoric (even Soueif ’s) spoke only of adjusting the relationship between ‘Arabs and the West’. Even among the best-intentioned scholars, this missing pole has obscured formative cultural relationships, simplified chains of cultural transmission, and, in particular, created the illusion of a têteà-tête with Shakespeare. The abstract idea of direct bilateral contact blocks out the reality of a multifaceted field of reception in which unpredictable – and sometimes politically potent – interpretations can take root. Reading Aboudoma’s ‘Gamlet is Russian for Hamlet’ today, we may smile at the irony of a Soviet embassy using Shakespeare’s Hamlet to push its cultural imperialist agenda. After all, is Shakespeare not a British ‘imperial institution’?56 Is Hamlet not the poster boy for Western individualised subjectivity? But this irony is only apparent – the artefact of an untheorised ‘West and the rest’ outlook that erases the Cold War from view. Aboudoma’s and Soueif’s accounts of their early Shakespeare encounters, nostalgia and all,



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help readjust that perspective. Such stories draw our attention to a highly charged historical moment that no longer exists, but whose impact continues to ramify through contemporary Arab rewritings of Shakespeare. Margaret Litvin is associate professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature at Boston University. Her book Hamlet’s Arab Journey: Shakespeare’s Prince and Nasser’s Ghost (Princeton UP, 2011), appeared in Soha Sebaie’s Arabic translation in 2017, and she co-edited and co-translated the companion anthology Four Arab Hamlet Plays (2016), one play from which was recently produced at Cornell University. Her current work explores two areas of transregional cultural flows: Arab-Russian literary ties, and contemporary Arab/ic theatre for global audiences. She has been an ACLS Burkhardt Fellow in Uppsala, Sweden, and an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin.

Notes 1. A playwright and director based in Alexandria, Egypt, Mahmoud Aboudoma has been the head of theatre programming at the Biblioteca Alexandrina. 2. I am grateful to Graham Holderness, Sameh F. Hanna and the members of Shannon Miller’s seminar at the Shakespeare Association of America (2007) for very helpful comments and suggestions. 3. Mahmud Abu Duma, ‘Raqsat Al-‘Aqarib’ [Dance of the Scorpions], in Ja’u Ilayna Gharqa; Al-Bi’r; Raqsat Al-‘Aqarib (Cairo: al-Hay’a al-Misriya al-‘Amma Lil-Kitab, 1989). Further references to this work are in the text. All translations from Arabic, unless otherwise noted, are mine. 4. The absence of female characters renders the play’s family politics at once less complex and more claustrophobic, boiling them down to the triad of father–son– uncle. Hamlet’s sexual puritanism is omitted. 5. As Egyptian critic Nehad Selaiha points out in her introduction to the published playtext (Abu Doma, ‘Raqsat Al-‘Aqarib’), 7–35, this revolutionary threat is adumbrated in Shakespeare’s Hamlet by Laertes’ entrance ‘in a riotous head’ in IV.v. 6. For this history see Margaret Litvin, Hamlet’s Arab Journey: Shakespeare’s Prince and Nasser’s Ghost (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011). 7. I.v.196–7 in William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins (Walton-onThames: Thomas Nelson & Sons Ltd, 1997). Subsequent references are to this edition. 8. Mahmoud Al-Shetawi, ‘Hamlet in Arabic’, Journal of Intercultural Studies 20.1 (1999), 49. Actually al-Shetawi’s ‘always’ is an oversimplification. This portrayal of Hamlet has been more honoured in the breach than in the observance; it

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did not become archetypal until the mid-1960s, and writers had begun to subvert it by the mid-1970s. 9. ‘Gamlet’, as we will see, is Russian for Hamlet. 10. I have been unable to locate any Shakespeare translation either by Muhammad Hassan al-Zayyat or by his contemporary Ahmad Hassan al-Zayyat. What Aboudoma most likely read was the translation by Muhammad Awad Muhammad, published as part of the Arab League’s 1955–1965 Shakespeare complete works translation project. In an email Aboudoma specified that the translation he read was ­published by ‘the Arab League’s educational department’ (personal communication, 13 July 2007). 11. Personal communication from Aboudoma (in English), 6 October 2002. Edited for grammar but otherwise verbatim. 12. The film is available on DVD with English subtitles from RusCiCo. 13. Mahmud Abu Duma, Nustalgiya: Hikayat Kharifiya [Nostalgia: Autumn Tales] (Cairo: Dar Sharqiyat, 2006), 35–42. The collection, also containing stories about the Upper Egypt of Aboudoma’s youth, is written in Egyptian colloquial Arabic (still a fairly unusual choice for published fiction). For a summary in English, see Hala Sami, ‘Remembrance of Things Past’, Al-Ahram Weekly, 14 September 2006. 14. The project was a major bragging point for Nasser’s regime. Also in attendance were the Yemeni president Abdullah al-Sallal, the Algerian president Ahmed Ben Bella and the Iraqi president Abdel Salam Arif. 15. ‘Kentucky’, as Egyptians call it, plays a large and ambivalent role in urban ­Egyptian culture. It is the symbol of globalisation and U.S. influence par excellence; for instance, protesters broke the windows of one ‘Kentucky’ restaurant in Cairo during demonstrations against U.S. and Israeli policies in the autumn of 2001. On the other hand, MacDonald’s and Kentucky also offer safe (glassed-in, well lit, relatively upscale) spaces for religious and/or upper-middle-class women to meet with their friends, in contrast to the forbidding male-centric ambience of most traditional cafés (ahawi). 16. For pioneering work on ‘local Shakespeare’ see Martin Orkin, Local Shakespeares: Proximations and Power (London: Routledge, 2005); and Sonia Massai, ed., Worldwide Shakespeares: Local Appropriations in Film and Performance (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2005). 17. Dennis Kennedy, ‘Afterword: Shakespearean Orientalism’, in Foreign Shakespeare, ed. Dennis Kennedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 300–301. Kennedy goes so far as to call this ‘the most important task Shakespeareans face … much more important than linguistic analysis, textual examination, psycho­ logical assessments, historical research, or any of the Anglo-centered occupations scholars have traditionally valued and perpetuated’. 18. This is an agenda informed by Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for ‘Indian’ Pasts?’ Representations 37 (Winter 1992); and more recently Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 1–24. 19. See Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London and New York: Routledge, 1989).



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20. Shawqi’s play deliberately goes around Shakespeare, drawing on earlier sources to present a fervently nationalistic and anticolonial Cleopatra. See Ahmad Shawqi, Masra’ Kliyubatra [The Tragedy of Cleopatra] (Cairo: al-Maktaba al-Tijariya alKubra, 1964). Studies on the play include Rafik Darragi, ‘Sexual Politics and Textual Patterns: Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra and Ahmed Shawky’s Death of Cleopatra’, in Theatrical Violence: Shakespearean and Other Studies (Tunis: Centre de Publication Universitaire, 2001), 161–75; and Waddah Al-Khatib, ‘Rewriting History, Unwriting Literature: Shawqi’s Mirror-Image Response to Shakespeare’, Journal of Arabic Literature 32.3 (2001), 256–83. 21. Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1992). 22. Ania Loomba, ‘“Local-manufacture Made-in-India Othello Fellows”: Issues of Race, Hybridity, and Location in Post-colonial Shakespeares’, in Post-colonial Shakespeares, ed. Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 163. 23. See Thomas Cartelli, Repositioning Shakespeare: National Formations, Postcolonial Appropriations (London: Routledge, 1999). 24. Irena Makaryk, Shakespeare in the Undiscovered Bourn: Les Kurbas, Ukrainian Modern­ism, and Early Soviet Cultural Politics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 5. 25. See M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981); H.R. Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982); Paul Friedrich, The Language Parallax: Linguistic Relativism and Poetic Indeterminacy (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986); and Paul Friedrich, Language, Context, and the Imagination: Essays (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1979). 26. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 78. 27. Ducis (1733–1816) admitted that he spoke point l’anglois (no English at all); his version was itself based on a prose summary and verse excerpts by Pierre Antoine de la Place (1707–1793). It ends with Hamlet killing Claudius (offstage), Gertrude committing suicide and Hamlet taking the throne. See Jean-François Ducis, Hamlet, tragédie, imitée de l’anglois (Paris: Chez Gogué, 1770); and Romy Heylen, Translation, Poetics, and the Stage: Six French Hamlets (London and New York: Routledge, 1993). 28. This helps explain the much-deplored infidelity of the early Arabic Shakespeare adaptations. Turn-of-the-century adaptors such as Najib al-Haddad (1867–1899) and Tanyus ‘Abdu (1869–1926), as well as the later ‘classical’ translator Khalil Mutran (1872–1949), all worked from French versions. See Margaret Litvin, ‘The French Source of the Earliest Surviving Arabic Hamlet,’ Shakespeare Studies 39 (2011), 133–151. 29. On postcolonial versions of Othello see Ferial J. Ghazoul, ‘The Arabization of Othello’, Comparative Literature 50.1 (1998), 1–31. Two quite different examples of Othello appropriation are Doditello (2001), Sameh Mahran’s farce incorporating the story of Dodi Fayyed and Diana, Princess of Wales; and Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North, trans. Denys Johnson-Davies (London: Heinemann, [1969] 1985). On The Merchant of Venice see Mark Bayer, ‘Shylock’s Revenge: The Merchant of Venice and the Arab–Israeli Conflict’ (paper presented at the

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­ hakespeare Association of America, Bermuda, 2005); and Mahmoud Al-ShetS awi, ‘The Merchant of Venice in Arabic’, Journal of Intercultural Studies 15 (1994), 15–25. 30. Othello was performed in Arabic. Badawi notes that the earliest production was subtitled Hiyal al-Rijal (The Wiles of Men) and emphasised gender relations over questions of religion, race and nation; see M.M. Badawi, ‘Shakespeare and the Arabs’, Cairo Studies in English (1963/1966): 181–96. On Khalil Mutran’s Othello (1912), see Sameh Hanna’s article in this volume. 31. For an argument that the frame stories in Taming of the Shrew and Midsummer Night’s Dream echo the structure of Arabian Nights tales, see Ibrahim Hamada, ‘Urubat Shaksbir: Dirasat Ukhra Fi Al-Drama Wa-Al-Naqd [Shakespeare’s Arabness and Other Studies in Drama and Criticism] (Cairo: al-Markaz al-Qawmi lil-Adab, 1989); and Ferial J. Ghazoul, Nocturnal Poetics: The Arabian Nights in Comparative Context (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1996), 108–20. For the Sufi resonance of the mystical discourse of love in Romeo and Juliet, see Abdulla Al-Dabbagh, ‘The Oriental Framework of Romeo and Juliet’, The Comparatist 24 (2000), 64–82. 32. Charles and Mary Lamb, Tales From Shakespeare (Philadelphia: Altemus, [1898]), 320. On the Arabic translation of Lamb’s Tales From Shakespeare see Tawfiq Habib, ‘Shaksbir Fi Misr’, [Shakespeare in Egypt] Al-Hilal, 1 December 1927, 201. 33. Sarah Bernhardt played Hamlet at the Abbas Theatre in Cairo in 1908. Alec Guinness’ Hamlet toured to Egypt in 1937; John Gielgud’s in 1940 and 1946; and Derek Jacobi’s in 1977 (he also went to Jordan). 34. This phrase has been used in this sense since 1952 by Egyptian, Syrian, Iraqi and Palestinian public intellectuals including Islamists, nationalists and liberals. Prominent users include the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Qatarbased Islamist preacher Shaykh Yusuf al-Qaradawi. 35. ‘Arab Near East’ is probably the best term here. This analysis is based on a study of Egypt, Syria and Iraq and would also apply to Lebanon, Palestine and Jordan. It does not consider Hamlet appropriations by Gulf or North African writers or by Arab writers based in Europe, whose work responds to different sets of cultural/ political dynamics. For an example of a 1968 Paris-based Moroccan rewriting that shares the characteristics I attribute to post-1976 Arab work, see Khalid Amine’s interview with Nabyl Lahlou in this volume. 36. Many emerging national movements have used Hamlet in this way. See, for example, Laura Raidonis Bates, ‘Shakespeare in Latvia: the Contest for Appropriation During the Nationalist Movement, 1884–1918’ (PhD, University of Chicago, 1998). For a satirical example involving Azerbaijan, see Kurban Said, Ali and Nino, trans. Jenia Graman (New York: Random House, 1970), 218. 37. The clearest examples come from the work of Alfred Faraj (Farag), especially his plays Sulayman of Aleppo (1964) and Prince Salim (1967). See Alfrid Faraj, Sulayman al-halabi, 2nd edn (Cairo: Dar al-Kitab al-‘Arabi, 1969); Alfrid Faraj, Al-Zir Salim (Cairo: Dar al-Kitab al-‘Arabi, 1967); and Rasheed El-Enany, ‘The Quest for Justice in the Theatre of Alfred Farag: Different Moulds, One Theme’, Journal of Arabic Literature 31.2 (2000), 171–202. Nehad Selaiha has pointed to the protagonist in Salah Abdel Sabur’s Tragedy of Al-Hallaj (1964) as another example of Hamlet-derived interiority: see Nehad Selaiha, ‘Poet, Rebel, Martyr’, Al-Ahram Weekly, 18 April 2002.



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38. On the best known of these, Muhammad Subhi’s 1976 Cairo production, see Litvin, Hamlet’s Arab Journey, chapter 5. 39. Besides Aboudoma’s play, other examples of this trend include Mamduh ‘Adwan, ‘Hamlit … yastayqizu muta’akhkhiran’ [Hamlet Wakes Up Late], Al-Mawqif al-adabi, no. 65/66 (1976): 178–228; Nadir ‘Umran, ‘Firqa masrahiya wajadat masrahan … fa-masrahat hamlit’ [A Theatre Company Found a Theatre and ‘Theatred’ Hamlet] (Amman: unpublished manuscript, 1984), performed at the Festival of Arabic Theatre in Rabat in 1984; Jawad al-Asadi, Insu Hamlit [Forget Hamlet] (Beirut: Dar al-Farabi, 2000); and ‘Abd al-Hakim al-Marzuqi, Isma’il Hamlit [Ismail/Hamlet] (Damascus, unpublished manuscript, 1999), performed by Masrah al-Rasif [Sidewalk Theatre] at the Carthage Festival in 1998 and in ­English translation at London’s International Festival of Theatre in June 1999. The playwrights’ countries of origin are Syria, Jordan, Iraq and Tunisia, respectively. I would argue that Kuwaiti-British playwright-director Sulayman Al-Bassam’s Al-Hamlet Summit bears a complex relation to this tradition, being composed outside it but gradually reappropriated into it by Arab audiences; see Sulayman Al-Bassam, The Al-Hamlet Summit Arabic and English, edited by Graham Holder­ness (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2006). 40. In general, 1964 was a high point of Shakespeare-related activity in the Arab world, due mainly to the celebration of Shakespeare’s quadricentennial. For instance, in that year Egypt’s National Theatre staged its first production of Hamlet (it opened in December), and Al-Masrah [Theatre] Magazine devoted a special issue (April) to Shakespeare. 41. He is associated with taurine imagery throughout. For instance, dancers wearing oversized bulls’ heads accompany the raucous torchlit banquet at the beginning of I.iv. In his director’s notes from the 1950s, Kozintsev writes: ‘[Claudius’] figure strikes me as a perverted unity of something heavy, coarsely powerful, bullish, and at other moments affectedly refined. There used to be winged bulls, and here another kind of nonsense: a bull with peacock feathers’. G.M. Kozintsev, Shakespeare: Time and Conscience, trans. Joyce Vining (New York: Hill and Wang, 1966), 222. This taurine Claudius echoes through many post-1976 Arab versions of Hamlet. 42. On Hamlet’s resulting loss of ‘interiority’ see Patrick Burke, ‘“Hidden Games, Cunning Traps, Ambushes”: The Russian Hamlet’, Shakespeare Yearbook 8 (1997), 163–80, 172. 43. All its major contributors had suffered under Stalin. Pasternak had turned to Shakespeare translation in search of both a livelihood and an artistic outlet. Kozintsev had been denounced as a ‘formalist’ by the Soviet Communist ­Party’s Central Committee in 1946. Composer Dmitri Shostakovich had also been attacked for ‘formalism’ in 1936 and 1948, but he had joined the Communist Party (perhaps under duress) in 1960. Innokenty Smoktunovsky, who played Hamlet, had been imprisoned in a labour camp in Norilsk, Siberia, after World War II. See Anatoly Smeliansky, The Russian Theatre After Stalin, trans. Patrick Miles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 15. 44. See Josephine Woll, Real Images: Soviet Cinema and the Thaw (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2000), 42. 45. On Nasser-era allegorical plays see Farouk Abdel Wahab, Modern Egyptian Drama (Minneapolis: Bibliotheca Islamica, 1974), 27. Such readings-à-clef are common in

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regimes where the censor is active. They were not without precedent in Egypt, where Khedive Ismail (r. 1863–1879) and later King Farouk (r. 1936–1952) had censored some productions that cast long-ago rulers in an unfavourable light. See Jacob Landau, Studies in the Arab Theater and Cinema (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1958), 63–65; and Joel Gordon, Revolutionary Melodrama: Popular Film and Civic Identity in Nasser’s Egypt (Chicago: Middle East Documentation Center, 2002), 59–60. 46. Jabra, a Palestinian poet/novelist/critic/translator living in Baghdad, later expressed indignation at this piracy. Comparing his role as translator to that of Pasternak he noted that the latter was prominently acknowledged in the film’s credits. Jabra ­Ibrahim Jabra, ‘Shaksbir mudtahadan wa-qadaya ukhra’ [Shakespeare Abused and Other Issues], in Mu‘aishat al-namira wa-awraq ukhra [Living With the Tigress and Other Papers] (Beirut: al-Mu’assassa al-‘arabiya lil-dirasat wa-l-nashr, 1992), 117–27. 47. ‘Nadi al-masrah: hamlit’ [The Theatre Club: Hamlet], al-Masrah [Theatre] 14 (1965), 73–75. 48. Jabir ‘Asfur, ‘Hamlit fi bustun’, [Hamlet in Boston] Al-Hayat, 30 May 2001, 19, emphasis added. Asfur has headed Egypt’s National Centre for Translation, and served as head of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Culture, head of Arabic at Cairo University, and editor-in-chief of the literary journal Fusul. This reminiscence opens a review of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of Hamlet, starring Simon Russell Beale, which came to Boston while Asfur was a visiting professor at Harvard in 2001. 49. At least in the DVD version, the film does not begin as he describes. Besides, Aboudoma does not read Russian. Rather than a literal memory of a first impression, then, this ‘beautiful phrase which stuck in [his] heart’ must be taken to represent Aboudoma’s composite impression of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in light of the film. 50. Ahdaf Soueif, Mezzaterra: Fragments from the Common Ground (New York: Anchor Books, 2005), 5. 51. Elsewhere she calls it ‘the world that my generation believed we had inherited’ (7, emphasis added). 52. Riyad ‘Ismat, ‘Hamlit kama akhrajtuhu’ [Hamlet as I Directed It], in Shaytan al-­masrah [The Devil of the Theatre] (Damascus: Dar Talas, 1986). 53. Jawad al-Asadi, Insu hamlit (Beirut: Dar al-Farabi, 2000); and see Jawad al-Assadi, Forget Hamlet, trans. Margaret Litvin in Four Arab Hamlet Plays, edited by Marvin Carlson and Margaret Litvin with Joy Arab (New York: Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, 2016). 54. Her word ‘interprets’ is the same word used to describe commentaries on the Qur’an. 55. See Fred Halliday, ‘The Unpublished Book of the Cold War’, The Round Table 90.358 (2001), 103–10. 56. See, for example, Michael Neill, ‘Post-colonial Shakespeare? Writing Away From the Centre’, in Post-colonial Shakespeares, ed. Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 172.

& Chapter 2

Decommercialising Shakespeare Mutran’s Translation of Othello Sameh F. Hanna

In a series of satirical narrative articles published in al-Sufur literary weekly in 1920, playwright and theatre critic Muhammad Taymur (1892–1921)1 describes a play he watched, not in reality, but in a dream.2 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.3 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 Notes for this section begin on page 56.

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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).4 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).5 Mutran’s Shakespeare translations were favourably received by critics and intellectuals, although not very successful with mainstream theatre audiences. Their legacy continued to be acknowledged in the Egyptian theatre for most of the twentieth century. It is because of Mutran’s translations that the very image of Shakespeare and his work became associated in the Egyptian public imagination with ‘high’ culture. This is in stark contrast with earlier translations in the last two decades of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when Shakespeare’s work was very much part of the ‘popular’ theatrical culture. Using the example of Mutran’s Othello, this article will look into his translations against the backdrop of early Egyptian theatre and in connection with the sociocultural dynamics of theatre production and translation.

Shakespeare in the Turn-of-the-century Egyptian Cultural Market Mutran’s contribution to the translation of Shakespeare’s plays marks a significant change in the history of Arabic representations of the Bard and his work. To fully appreciate the legacy of Mutran as a translator of Shakespeare into Arabic, one needs to locate his work within the context of earlier translations/translators of Shakespeare. Let me start by sketching the dynamics of the cultural market in which Mutran’s predecessors had to operate. Understanding the sociocultural dynamics of cultural production in Egypt during the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, where and when the early translations of Shakespeare into Arabic were



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produced, will help us properly understand the linguistic as well as the aesthetic choices of the early translators. The first generation of Shakespeare translators into Arabic were freelance translators, mostly Syro-Lebanese émigrés, who depended on translation for a living. These translators, who immigrated to Egypt over the last three decades of the nineteenth century, were part of a significant change in the cultural scene in Egypt, generally known as al-Nahda (literally, revival or renaissance).6 These immigrants played a pioneering role in initiating and promoting such new cultural activities as journalism, theatre and translation. Their translation activities were focused on drama, which they translated mainly for the stage, and popular fiction, which they usually serialised in entertainment and literary magazines and later published in book form. These cultural products were qualitatively different both from the elitist culture offered by scholars of religion (‘ulama’) – ­religious exegesis, books on Arabic grammar and rhetoric, commentaries on classical poetry and various books of tradition (turath) – and from the popular culture of the time, which mainly found expression in popular singing, folk tales, and acrobat and circus playing, all practised in such public spaces as markets and cafés. These translators, together with the theatre managers for whom they worked, sought to carve out a niche in the cultural market that would guarantee a modicum of economic success. The sociocultural formation of Egyptian society during the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the structural changes which occurred within it, especially under and after Muhammad ‘Ali (reigned 1805–1848), shaped the conditions of the cultural market. Egypt comprised three sociocultural groups: the old intellectual elite, the new intellectual elite and the masses. The culture produced by the ulama, who made up the old elite, targeted a marginal sector of Egyptian consumers of culture which included fellow ulama and students at al-Azhar. Since the majority of Egyptians during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were illiterate, they had no access to and no appreciation for the cultural products of ulama.7 The second sociocultural group which emerged in the Egyptian society during the nineteenth century comprised the graduates of the secular schools founded by Muhammad ‘Ali and his successors. The secularisation of education, which was meant by Muhammad ‘Ali to undermine the authority of ulama, led to the emergence of

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new generations of young Egyptians who were obviously disillusioned by classical culture, and hence needed new forms of culture that would respond to their newly formed tastes and aesthetic expectations. The rise of this new intellectual elite in the second half of the nineteenth century coincided, as mentioned earlier, with waves of immigration of Christian Levantines to Egypt, especially after the interfaiths violence in 1860 between Christians on one side and both Muslims and Druze on the other.8 Besides being educated in French missionary schools, these immigrants, because of their Christian background, had found it easy to break away from the classical norms and aesthetics of the Arabic-Islamic literary tradition. It was through these immigrants, together with a few Egyptians, that new forms of culture well suited to the needs of the new elite were produced. Theatre was one of these new cultural products. The third sociocultural group included the majority of Egyptians; these were peasants, artisans, small traders, urban workers and unemployed individuals with little or no education. The culture produced and consumed by this group had two main characteristics. First, since this type of culture was produced by and for the nonelite segment of Egyptian society, it defied rules of grammaticality, decorum and the canonised aesthetics of classical Arabic. It invested, instead, in the aesthetics of colloquial Egyptian Arabic. Although the popular culture produced and consumed by Egyptians under Ottoman rule partially drew upon the thematic repertoire of classical Arabic and addressed stories of heroism from the Arabic and Islamic traditions, these themes were communicated in a language variety and aesthetics suited to the taste of the masses. Second, the popular culture of the Egyptians during that time was characterised by a significant use of nonverbal media of expression. Language was not the only component of folk tales, heroic epics and shadow plays presented in cafés, streets and markets. Besides singing and narration, elements of physical theatre were also involved. These two characteristics of popular culture would influence the way drama was first translated and staged in the last quarter of the nineteenth century in Egypt. What was of great concern for the freelance drama translators, together with such culture producers as journalists, theatre makers and writers who emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century, was how to position themselves and their products in relation to these sociocultural groups. The economic factor seemed to have



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played a key role in deciding which group early drama translators would target with their products. The fact that these translators fled their homeland because of a ‘deteriorating economic situation’,9 among other reasons, and that they relied on their language skills as the only source of income, made economic success the primary motive for their translation activities. It would have been risky for the early translators of Shakespeare to gear their products only to the new intellectual elite who were still marginal, compared to the majority of illiterate or near-illiterate Egyptians. It is for this reason that the large, nonelite segment of the Egyptian society was targeted as the main consumer of their translations, while the new elite was also taken into consideration, though in a lesser degree. This conditioned the translation decisions made by the early translators of Shakespeare into Arabic. Arab translators started to take interest in Shakespeare’s dramatic work in the 1890s.10 It was Shakespeare’s tragedies, rather than his comedies and histories, which caught the attention of the early translators. Whereas seven translations of Shakespeare’s tragedies appeared during the period from 1890 to 1911, only one translation of a comedy was produced, namely that of The Two Gentlemen of Verona by Muhammad Ghalwash, published in 1905 under the title al-Hub wa al-Sadaqa, aw Sharifa Verona (Love and Friendship, or The Two Gentlemen of Verona). Translations of the histories started as late as 1925 with Muhammad ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Amin’s version of Henry VIII.11 Except for two translations of Macbeth, both published in 1911, one in Cairo by Muhammad ‘Iffat al-Qadi and the other in Alexandria by Ahmad Muhammad Salih, all translations of the tragedies were put on stage and were later published in book form. Consumers of foreign drama in Egypt during that time were mainly theatregoers rather than readers. When the stage version of any of Shakespeare’s plays happened to meet with commercial success, the translator would publish the same version without adjusting it for the different medium. Hence, publishing until the first decade of the twentieth century did not imply an intention to address new consumers of culture. It rather implied an attempt by the translator to further invest in a commercially successful translation. Among the early translators of Shakespeare’s tragedies the name of Tanyus ‘Abdu stands out. In addition to his translations for the stage, ‘Abdu authored plays himself, especially for the troupe of Iskandar Farah, translated fiction and contributed extensively to

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the then emerging field of journalism. Tanyus ‘Abdu’s translations are illustrative of the practices of early Shakespeare translators and the translation norms to which they subscribed. For instance, his 1901 version of Hamlet12 underlines the pressures of the cultural market as well as the taste and aesthetic expectations of mainstream theatre-­goers at the time. ‘Abdu introduced three main changes to the original Hamlet13 to make the translation accessible to the majority of Egyptian consumers of culture. First, he changed the plot of Shakespeare’s play: instead of the bloody ending we have in Shakespeare, ‘Abdu keeps Hamlet alive and gives him back the throne of his father. The fact that the renowned and very popular singer-actor Shaykh Salama Hijazi (1852–1917) played the title role in the play meant that the audience would not have accepted seeing Hamlet killed. Furthermore, sad endings would have been unusual for theatre audiences at that time, simply because all the folk narratives they were aware of concluded with happy endings.14 The second change had to do with Hamlet’s language, which was rendered into rhythmic and versified lyrics to be sung by Hijazi. The translation, due to these two changes, shifted the genre of the original from a tragedy into a musical melodrama. Third, the language of the translation was generally a hybrid of fusha (standard or classical Arabic) and ‘ammiyya (the colloquial). Again, the early translators were straddling two types of consumers of drama translation: the new elite and the Egyptian masses. This explains the oscillation between classical and colloquial.15 Market pressures placed a special premium on singing in theatre productions. The success or failure of theatre companies during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was determined by which singer the troupe had for the leading roles. The voice of Salama Hijazi, for instance, was sufficient to secure a box office hit.16 All the translators, including those of Shakespeare, who were commissioned to translate plays where Hijazi would perform the leading role, knew that an indispensable part of their job was to invest in those parts in their source texts that lent themselves to singing, and if necessary to author textual segments that could be sung. Muhammad Yusif Najm reports that when Hijazi came under pressure from some reviewers to rid his performance of Hamlet of music, he gave in and acted Tanyus ‘Abdu’s version without singing.17 The un­ favourable response from the audience, who would not allow Hijazi to have the curtain lowered without singing, forced him to refrain



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from performing Hamlet for some time. Meanwhile, Hijazi went in search of Tanyus ‘Abdu to ask him to add some extra lyrical pieces to his translation. When he could not find him, he asked the renowned Egyptian poet Ahmad Shawqi (1869–1932) to compose a poem that Hamlet could sing. Shawqi’s poem, which was kept by ‘Abdu when he later published his own translation, is a melodramatic summation of the disasters that befall Hamlet.18 This prioritisation of commercial success would be challenged by an emerging alliance of drama translators, theatre directors and actors, for whom cultural capital in the form of recognition, cultural prestige and canonisation was the primary goal.

New Norms of Shakespeare Translation Into Arabic In contrast with the predominantly commercial mode of drama translation around the turn of the twentieth century, drama translation in the 1910s saw a tendency by an emerging group of translators to distance themselves from the dictates of the market. The new generation of drama translators was not as keen to accumulate economic capital as to gain the recognition of critics, intellectuals, reviewers and fellow translators. This coincided with the appearance of theatre producers who were willing to try out different modes of theatre making and theatre reviewers who saw the possibility of producing theatre other than Salama Hijazi’s musicals and the slapstick comedies of other minor troupes. In view of these changes, appealing to the taste of commercial theatre consumers was no longer the only criterion of success. Although producing drama translation primarily for publication was still not the norm,19 it was increasingly becoming an option for drama translators. Published drama translation in the 1910s was targeted more at the new intellectual elite than the Egyptian masses. The way the new generation of drama translators in general, and translators of Shakespeare in particular, framed and packaged their translations through their paratexts signals this reorientation. On the front cover of his translation of Macbeth, published in 1911, Muhammad ‘Iffat writes a versified dedication that reads: ‘Our Arabisation is dedicated to the whole world; to every writer, poet or scholar.20 On the same cover he makes a special dedication to the ‘virtuous scholar’ (al-‘alim al-Fadil) Tabuz Zada Husayn Rushdi Pasha, the then Foreign Minister of Egypt. This valorisation of the

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elitist consumers of Shakespeare translation was reinforced by the assertion that Shakespeare is not for entertainment or pastime in theatres, but rather for study and meditation through reading, as Sami al-Juraydini says in the preface to his translation of Hamlet whose first edition was most probably published around the second decade of the twentieth century.21 The tendency to distance drama translation from economic pressures was also noticeable, though not on a large scale, in translating for the stage. Hasan al-Sharif, translator of Victorien Sardou’s La Tosca, gave his translation to the troupe of ‘Abd al-Rahman Rushdi to be staged in 1918, asking not to be paid but only for the translation to be acted and staged in the best possible way.22 The significant change in the norms of drama translation in the 1910s was due to changes in the economics and politics of the theatrical scene and to the rise of a different cadre of drama translators. This change was also made possible by the support offered by a group of highbrow theatre critics, such as Muhammad Taymur, who found in the new Arabic versions of Shakespeare, especially those by Khalil Mutran, a remedy for the commercial versions produced by people like Tanyus ‘Abdu. Changes in the Theatrical Scene: the Theatre of Jurj Abyad One of the key agents in the Egyptian theatre during that time who facilitated this change of norms in Shakespeare translation and in drama translation in general was the actor, director and producer Jurj Abyad (1880–1959). Abyad was born in Beirut and moved to Egypt in 1898, where he stayed till the end of his life. In 1904 he managed to secure a stipend from Khedive ‘Abbas Hilmi II to study the art of acting at the Paris Conservatoire. On his return to Egypt in 1910 he started presenting performances to the French community and French-educated Egyptians in Egypt. Meanwhile he was encouraged by nationalist leader Sa‘d Zaghlul to stage his plays in Arabic. ­Zaghlul, who served as education minister from 1906 to 1910, had at the top of his agenda the Arabisation of educational curricula and found in the gifted and well-educated Abyad and the kind of theatre he produced a viable means for promoting his policy of Arabi­zation.23 In response to Zaghlul’s request, Abyad started looking for quality play texts in Arabic that he could put on stage. The available play texts at the time did not meet the require-



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ments of Abyad, who was aiming to present a more culturally pres­ tigious form of theatre than Salama Hijazi’s musicals. In April 1911 he set out to commission translations of world theatre classics by renowned Egyptian and Levantine writers of the day. The majority of these writers, including Mutran, were translating theatre for the first time. In al-Akhbar newspaper on 27 April 1911, Jurj Abyad is reported to have been trying to commission ‘the great poets and writers’ to translate plays into ‘classical Arabic’.24 On 25 August 1911, the same newspaper reported that Jurj Abyad managed to reach agreements with a group of men of letters who would Arabise a number of dramatic works. The name of ‘Khalil Effendi Mutran’ was mentioned as the would-be translator of Othello. The reporter was also keen to mention that Abyad commissioned a specialist in ‘ilqa’ (declamation), Filib Effendi Makhluf, who would ‘instruct and train actors on how to declaim properly in Arabic’.25 Commissioning distinguished men of letters of high calibre and insisting on using classical Arabic and training actors and actresses to use it proficiently flag Abyad’s urge to dissociate himself from the practices of commercial theatre. The first theatrical season for Abyad after he started presenting plays in Arabic was immediately successful, despite the elitist nature of his theatre. It seems that the support of the Khedive and the prestige conferred on Abyad by newspapers, which presented him to the public as the first Egyptian who had a degree from France in dramatic arts, constituted a kind of symbolic capital that placed Abyad and his troupe in a more advantageous position than other troupes operating at the time. In spite of the absence of any mention of singing and comic scenes from newspaper advertisements of Abyad’s performances,26 the performances presented by the troupe during this season were so successful that tickets were almost sold out every night, as al-Muqattam newspaper reports in its issue of 19 March 1912. Like most newspapers at the time, al-Muqattam attributed this success to three major reasons: first, the outstanding qualifications of Jurj Abyad, which he acquired from Sylvain, the greatest French actor at the time, with whom he learnt and practised acting in Paris; second, the great care he took in selecting and training actors and actresses for his group; third, his selection of major classics to be translated by great Arab writers and poets (ibid).27 However, Abyad’s success was short lived.28 The sophisticated audience needed for Abyad’s ‘serious theatre’ (al-masrah al-jaddi)29 was not yet large enough to keep his troupe going with the same

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mode of production for more than one season. It seems that towards the end of his first season Abyad had already concluded that he could not count on the limited elite audience of Cairo for long-term success. Hence, in his second season in 1912, he tried to reach out to a wider sector of the Egyptian audience. Abyad then made a number of compromises in his selection and performance of play texts.30 This might have been the reason that drove Mutran to publish his translation of Othello late in the same year. It was not until 1917 that Mutran collaborated again with Abyad, offering him a translation of Macbeth. A new generation of Shakespeare translators Mutran belonged to a new group of drama translators who emerged during the second decade of the twentieth century. These translators were not economically dependent on translation. They were mainly middle-class professionals who already had jobs as judges, lawyers, university professors, teachers of translation and foreign languages, doctors and government officials.31 Looking for recognition, the newcomers to the field32 deployed the cultural and social capital they possessed. By flagging their cultural and educational assets and their social resources, especially on the covers of published translations, these new translators strove to challenge the authority of the old group whose legitimacy in the field was mainly dependent on the box office success of their translations. Thus, Muhammad Hamdi, a newcomer to the field of drama translation in 1912, writes under his name on the cover of his published translation of Julius Caesar ‘a teacher of translation at the Higher School of Teachers’.33 Similarly, Fathi Bek ‘Azmi, the translator of a Turkish play entitled in Arabic Fath al-Andalus (Conquest of Andalusia), describes himself on the cover of the translation which was published in 1912 as ‘head teacher and founder of the National Ottoman School’.34 Other newcomers sought to gain recognition by flagging their social capital in the form of family status and social connections with intellectual figures or people in high official positions.35 Muhammad ‘Iffat describes himself on the cover of the first edition of his translation of Macbeth, published in 1911, as ‘the son of Khalil Pasha ‘Iffat’36 and on the cover of his translation of The ­Tempest (1909) as ‘an ex-judge in civil courts’.37 ‘Iffat also highlights his connections with prominent figures of the day: in the short pref-



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ace to his translation of The Tempest he underlines his connection to the prominent intellectual figure at the time, Shaykh Muhammad ‘Abdu, when he says that Shaykh ‘Abdu endorsed the translation and ‘encouraged me to publish it’.38 Invoking the support of a respected intellectual figure like Shaykh Muhammad ‘Abdu helped establish the legitimacy of the translation, based on criteria other than commercial success. One of the key tactics which the new generation of drama translators, particularly those who translated Shakespeare, deployed to establish their legitimacy in the field was their emphasis in their published translations on a purported fidelity to the original text. This was regardless of whether or not their actual translation practice honoured the ideal of ‘fidelity’ they promoted in the prefaces and short introductions to their translations. In three important translations published in 1912, one of Othello by Khalil Mutran and two of Julius Caesar by Muhammad Hamdi and Sami al-Juraydini, the issue of fidelity was overemphasised in the translators’ paratexts. Both Mutran and Hamdi state in the prefaces to their translations that theirs are almost literal renderings of what Shakespeare says ‘letter for letter, word for word’,39 where ‘no word, phrase, simile, metonymy, nor metaphor is left out’.40 Al-Juraydini goes a step further in his attempt to distance himself from the practices of commercially oriented drama translators. He reiterates what he says in the preface to his translation of Hamlet when he states that Shakespeare’s plays are not for the ‘ephemeral pleasure of viewing and hearing’. For him, these plays are rather to be read in order for us to ‘explore [their] noble meanings and profound thoughts’; and in order to achieve that, al-Juraydini maintains that he did his best to render Shakespeare’s play into Arabic, ‘making [his translation] exactly the same as the original, in meaning and structure’.41 One way of investing in Shakespeare’s ‘noble meanings and profound thoughts’ was to show their value in the target culture/ society. This was another tactic that the new generation of Shakespeare translators employed to establish their distinction in the field of drama translation. Muhammad Hamdi, for instance, framed his published translation of Julius Caesar in a way that indirectly highlights its political implications for Egypt which was then under British occupation. On the front cover of the translation and under the title he writes: ‘this play represents the eruption of nationalistic pride among the nations aspiring to democracy’. Following a

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­ refatory note on the translation is a picture of Shakespeare under p which Hamdi writes: ‘William Shakespeare, the democratic English poet and playwright’.42 These paratextual cues were meant to signal a new mode of Shakespeare translation, with priorities different from those embraced by commercially oriented translators. Mutran’s translation of Othello is another clear example of how the new generation of Shakespeare translators sought distinction vis-à-vis previous and existing translators.

Mutran and the Decommercialisation of the Arabic Shakespeare Mutran translated four of Shakespeare’s plays: Othello, Macbeth, Hamlet and The Merchant of Venice. Apart from drama translation, he contributed to such diverse activities as fiction translation, journalism and poetry. Two important factors in his early education seem to have affected his drama translation practices. The first was his early affiliation with French culture through the French education he received at the Roman Catholic Patriarchate College in Beirut; and the second was the distinguished Arabic training he was given by the Lebanese linguist and language reformer Ibrahim al-Yaziji (1847–1906). His affiliation with the French language and culture was strengthened when he spent two years in Paris from 1890 to 1892. His training in classical Arabic with al-Yaziji developed into a life-long infatuation with and commitment to the poetics of classical literary Arabic. His defence of classical Arabic as a marker of a PanArab identity was motivated by his avowed opposition to Turkish as an emblem of the Ottoman authority. It was because of this opposition that Mutran was persecuted by Sultan ‘Abd al-Hamid’s police, who accused him of plotting against the Sultan’s rule in Ottoman territories.43 Eventually, he had to leave Beirut and flee to Paris, and from there he went to Egypt. Mutran translated fiction from French as early as 1894, when he published a translation of a novel under the Arabic title al-Intiqam [The Revenge]. He also translated a novel by the French novelist Paul Bourget, under the Arabic title al-Gharib [The Stranger]. In contrast to his fellow Levantines, Mutran chose not to produce translations of plays until Abyad commissioned him in 1912. As ‘Abd al-Rahman Sidqi suggests, the notorious practices of drama translators in turnof-the-century Egypt were not inviting for someone with Mutran’s



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linguistic and literary aspirations.44 Thus, when he was first asked to translate Othello for Abyad, he writes, he was hesitant to accept the offer. He only accepted it when he saw Abyad and his troupe rehearsing Oedipus and admired their performance.45 In addition to Othello, Mutran translated two of Shakespeare’s tragedies, Macbeth in 1917 and Hamlet in 1918; he also translated The Merchant of Venice in 1922. Although he mentions in the introduction to his translation of The Merchant of Venice that he translated eight of Shakespeare’s plays, only these four are attributed to him in the literature. The five years separating Mutran’s first and second translations for Jurj Abyad and the four years separating his third and fourth translations can probably be explained by what he might have seen as the sad realities of both drama translation and ­theatre production at the time. Taymur suggests in his fictional trial of playwrights and translators that Mutran was so unhappy with the performance of some actors in his version of Othello that he decided to refrain from drama translation for a while. He also suggests that other minor troupes hijacked Mutran’s translations and misrepresented them on stage. This might have been the reason that motivated Mutran to publish his translations within short periods of their first staging in order to protect them from piracy.46 In contrast with Tanyus ‘Abdu’s and Najib al-Haddad’s translations of Shakespeare’s plays, Mutran’s translations stick more closely to the source texts. Yet, although there are no significant interpolations in the form of monorhyming verses for singing, or major changes of the thematic structure as was the case with previous translators, Mutran tended to leave out some scenes for reasons to do with the requirements of theatrical production. He makes this clear in the introduction to his published translation of Hamlet, where he says that he turned the five acts of Shakespeare’s text into four. On this Mutran says: This story I translated as it is in the original. However, to make its beauties stand out in Arabic acting, it was thought that its scenes should not be kept as in the original, because they are too lengthy in terms of time and the requirements of modern acting … . Everything included in the dialogue that implies … noble meanings was translated literally and thoroughly. Some unusual talk included in the dialogue, which did not fall within the core theme, was unanimously thought by the artists in charge to be better left out of the play. This would be more appropriate for acting and more effective for the spectators.47

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In his translations for the troupe of Jurj Abyad, Mutran had to make a minimum number of compromises in order for his work to conform to the realities of theatre. However, his attribution of all omissions to the ‘requirements of acting’ cannot be taken at face value. For instance, playing down the scenes of the witches in Macbeth could be attributed to self-censorship, either by Mutran or Abyad, as a result of reported banning at the time of plays representing witchcraft. In 1913, the Ministry of the Interior banned a performance by Abyad’s troupe based on a translation by Farah Antun of Victorien Sardou’s The Witch. The play was reported to have provoked complaints from heads of religious communities.48 Maintaining a high degree of closeness to the source text, or claiming to do so, was not the only means of asserting distinction vis-à-vis earlier translations of Shakespeare. Mutran strove to stress the distinction of his translations by highlighting another function of translation than the mere rendering of texts from one language to another. Mutran’s published translation of Othello and his introduction to it reveal a translator who is keen to distance himself from the colloquial translations of comic theatres and the half-colloquial-half-classical translations of musical theatre. For Mutran, choosing classical Arabic in his translation of Othello serves a great political cause that lifts his translation well above the commercially oriented translations produced during the turn of the century. The section that follows will focus on Mutran’s translation of Othello and the way he politicises his choice of classical Arabic as a medium for his translation. In the introduction to his translation of Othello, Mutran reveals a striking view of the connection between language and national identity. He asks which language variety and style would be most suitable for his translation: ‘would it be that patchy style where the standard is blemished by the rags of the vernacular?’ After a categorical ‘no’, he aggressively attacks Arabic vernaculars: ‘By God, if I could put my hands on the vernacular, I would have killed it unremorsefully, and this I would have done in revenge for a glory [of the past] that is elevated above all glory … and for a nation whose unity has been shattered by its vernaculars’.49 Standard Arabic, alternatively termed ‘classical Arabic’, according to Mutran, is not only a means of communication. It also serves a political as well as a symbolic function: it is capable of both unifying the Arab nations whose unity ‘had been shattered by the vernaculars’, and invoking the glorious past of the Arabs. Pan-nationalist



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discourses in the Arab Middle East have invested in this symbolic function of standard Arabic as an emblem of the glorious past of the Arab nation. Yasir Suleiman rightly notes that it is through Standard Arabic that ‘nationalism in the Arab Middle East can define for itself a usable past, a source of tradition and authenticity which can enable it to stand its ground in relation to other nationalisms inside and outside its immediate geographical context’. This accounts for the marginality of territorial nationalist projects which distanced themselves from the Standard, and hence from the Arab past.50 The remarkable presence of the ‘glorious past’, as instantiated by the poetics of standard Arabic, is not only identifiable in Mutran’s translations, but also marks a major component of his overall poetic project. In his introduction to the first volume of his Diwan, published in 1908, Mutran describes his experience and understanding of poetry as follows: I followed the example of the pre-Islamic Arabs in adapting … to the spontaneity of their thoughts and innermost feelings, and I met the needs of my own age by the use of bold wording and phraseology. I have no fear of occasionally employing unconventional language and metaphor, but, at the same time, I safeguard the fundamental and basic rules of the language.51

Embracing the poetics of pre-Islamic Arabic is what makes Mutran in his translation of Othello keen to remove not only traces of the vernacular, but also traces of foreignness. He adopts a strategy of ‘Arabisation’ (ta‘rib) which gives Shakespeare’s text a distinctive Arab character.52 This strategy is enacted at more than one level. First, Mutran Arabises the source of Shakespeare’s text. In other words, he maintains that the story of the Moor is originally an Arabic story, which Shakespeare must have read in Arabic or in translation,53 and hence in Arabising Othello, Mutran is simply redeeming it into the language and tradition from which it was dispossessed: ‘I approached this play’, he says, ‘to Arabise it, as if I am intending to retrieve it into its origin’.54 The interesting thing here is the shifting of positions by means of which Shakespeare’s text becomes a translation, whereas Mutran’s Arabisation occupies the place of the source text. This de­ hierarchisation of the relation between the Shakespearean source text and the Arabised version is further asserted when Mutran claims that the name of the title hero must have been the deformed Anglicisation of an originally Arabic name. Thus, when Mutran renders Othello into ‘Utayl he claims that he is rectifying the name used by

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­ hakespeare into its correct Arabic original.55 The strategy of ArabiS sation is extended a step further: Mutran Arabises not only the source of Shakespeare’s plot and the name of the title hero, but also Shakespeare himself: ‘In Shakespeare’s soul’, he says, ‘there is definitely something of an Arab … in all he writes, in general, there is something of the spirit of Bedouins, something grounded in the constant return to the free instinct’.56 Arabisation, in the case of Mutran, is an act of reclamation of what is believed to be the ‘real’ self; it is an act of redeeming the self from the textual distortions of the other. In the words of Feria Ghazoul in her comment on the Arabic appropriations of Othello, the Arabs’ approach to Othello involved an endeavour to ‘“correct” and revise the presence of one’s own “type” in the foreign text – to reclaim and “re-­authenticize” the image’.57 The strategy of Arabisation is worked out in the discourse of translation mainly through the character of Othello and the specific language he uses. Classical Arabic, with its almost archaic diction and highly polished and stylised structures, is the medium of ­Othello’s discourse. Mutran imbues Othello’s address to the Venetian senate (I.iii), where he explains how Desdemona willingly gave him her heart, with all the qualities of an enchanting Arab storyteller. His Arabisation is easily detected in this scene: othello: And little of this great world can I speak More than pertains to feats of broil and battle, And little shall I grace my cause In speaking for myself.58

In Mutran’s translation the lines are rendered as follows:

‘utayl: Apart from the feats of broil and battle, I find little that my tongue can utter of the conditions of this huge world, and if I speak for myself, I cannot sweeten my defence, and there is no need to worry about the effect of my rhetorical devices on you.59

In addition to the use of such lexical items as ‘tongue’ and expressions such as ‘sweeten my defence’, the interpolated sentence ‘and one should not worry about the effect of my rhetorical devices on you’ gives the impression that Othello’s power lies in his discourse, and that he is capable of relating to others and manipulating them



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through the unusual effects of his language. Mutran’s translation subverts the presuppositions of Shakespeare’s text: substituting ‘defence’, in the translation, for ‘cause’ places the Arabised Othello in the position of a powerless victim, and projects him as an Arab defendant in a Western court. However, the seemingly powerless character insinuates himself into the position of the powerful by way of a weapon that his jurors lack: ‘sweetened’ discourse and ‘rhetorical devices’. Mutran’s translation highlights the power of language as a means for shifting positions from object to subject, from a defendant who must respond to his judges’ questions to a rhetorician whose language tricks are capable of controlling his audience. Throughout the play, Mutran maintains for Othello this powerful discourse, which remains stylised, heroic and consistent, even at those moments when Othello, in Shakespeare’s text, seems to lose control over his discourse. In Act IV, scene I, when Othello finally falls prey to Iago’s insinuations that Desdemona committed adultery with Cassio, his discourse changes into a series of questions and exclamations that he addresses to Iago. When Iago answers Othello’s question about what Cassio did, using the single punning word ‘lie’, Othello’s response, in Shakespeare’s text, is as follows: othello: Lie with her? lie on her? We say lie on her When they belie her! Lie with her, zounds, that’s Fulsome! – Handkerchief! Confessions! Handkerchief!60

In Mutran’s translation the three lines are rendered into the following line:

‘utayl: With her … close to her … terrifying matter. The handkerchief … the confessions … the handkerchief (115).

In order to avoid Othello’s bewilderment at the punning in Iago’s ‘lie’, Mutran translates it as bata (spent the night). Overlooking the pun in the English word ‘lie’ helps to maintain Othello’s control over his discourse. He does not have to look for answers from Iago. In Shakespeare’s text, the punning ‘lie’ shatters Othello’s discourse and makes him dependent on someone else’s in order to make sense of what is going on. By contrast, Othello’s discourse in Mutran’s translation is self-sufficient. The Arabised Othello does not need explanations from the outside; traces of questioning and exclamation are removed from his discourse. Not only does the Arabised Othello

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maintain control over his discourse, but his language also remains ennobled, poetic and distanced from the profanity suggested by such expressions as ‘lie with her’ and ‘lie on her’. In overlooking the pun in ‘lie’, Mutran might have followed the anonymous Arabic translation of Othello which was popular among Egyptians at the time. In this translation, entitled Utillo, or the Trickeries of Men (Utillu, aw Hiyyal al-Rijal), the verb ‘lie’ is rendered in Arabic as ‘slept at her place’ (nama ‘indaha).61 However, bata in Mutran’s version asserts the representation of Othello as an Arab leader whose discourse is not only self-sufficient, but also elevated from the earthiness of others’ discourses. Perhaps the only Arabic version that managed to both reproduce the pun in ‘lie’ and accentuate the earthiness of Othello’s discourse is Mustapha Safouan’s translation in Egyptian colloquial. For ‘lie’ Safouan chose the vulgar colloquial word abah, meaning ‘to be dirty or filthy with somebody’. Besides, in a footnote he says that the word is punning and can mean ‘not to tell the truth’. Safouan justifies his representation of the character of Othello as a weak and vulnerable Arab reader on political grounds that are diametrically opposed to those of Mutran. Unlike Mutran, Safouan contends that classical Arabic has always been a tool of repression that was effectively used by the political and social elite to deny common people access to knowledge. Translating Othello in Egyptian colloquial Arabic was for Safouan one way of challenging a long history of intellectual and political dictatorship.62 Foregrounding the Pan-Arab identity of Othello by endowing him with the symbolic power of Classical Arabic is effected in Mutran’s translation at the expense of other non-Arab identities that show up in Shakespeare’s text. In Arabising Othello, Mutran leaves out all references to religions and ethnicities. He omits references to heathen gods and Christian oaths. For instance, in Act IV, scene II, when Othello confronts Desdemona with his suspicions and asks: ‘Are you a strumpet?’, her answer is: ‘No, as I am a Christian’.63 In Mutran’s translation this becomes:

‘utayl: Are you not a whore? daydamuna: No, by He who created me a devout woman.64



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Othello’s references to ‘Turks’, ‘Ottomites’ and ‘Christian shame’ are all deleted in lines 166–8 of Act II, scene III, where Othello orders Cassio and Roderigo to hold their anger and not to behave like the barbarous Turks. Also in Othello’s presuicidal monologue in Act V, scene II, Mutran omits the phrase ‘circumcised dog’ referring to the Muslim Turk whom Othello killed in Aleppo. He also leaves out the reference to the ‘base Indian’. Mutran even avoids direct references to the ‘Turks’ or ‘Ottomans’ as ‘enemy’. In the same monologue he omits the phrase ‘the malignant and turbanned Turk’. In Act I, scene III, the duke of Venice says to Othello: ‘Valiant Othello, we must straight employ you / Against the general enemy Ottoman’.65 Mutran renders this as follows:

duke: Valiant ‘Utayl, we must straight employ you against the enemy of the country.

There were still then a large number of families in Egypt who came from Turkish background, and who still had some affiliation with their culture of origin; these included the family of the renowned Egyptian poet Ahmad Shawqi, who was still alive at the time and many of the ruling elite. Referring to these families as ‘enemy’ would have undermined Mutran’s inclusive agenda of Arabism. Mutran’s vision of a homogenising and inclusive Arabism, founded mainly on standard Arabic as the common bond among the Arabs, prioritises the collective identity over individual, regional and ethnic, as well as religious identities. This vision is embedded in his translation. No wonder, then, that when the cultural committee of the Arab League launched a project for translating Shakespeare’s complete works into Arabic in the mid-1950s, it did not commission a translation of Othello; it found in Mutran’s translation an actuali­ sation of Arabism, which featured at the top of the Arab League’s political and cultural agenda. It was Mutran’s political agenda, flagged in the preface to his version of Othello and deployed through the translation, which ushered in a new era of Shakespeare translation into Arabic. This agenda and Mutran’s avowed commitment to the ideal of ‘fidelity’ to the author set Mutran’s translations apart from what was seen by translation and theatre historians as commercially driven translations of Shakespeare.

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Conclusion: The Paradox of the ‘Living Name’ and the ‘Ageing Translations’ The enduring appeal of Mutran’s translations in the field of drama translation and the distinguished position they occupied as classics that ‘stood the test of time’ cannot be explained only by their textual qualities. One can even argue that Mutran’s translations, if judged solely on linguistic grounds, reveal symptoms of ageing, even within a short period of their original production. Indeed, Mutran was criticised by his contemporaries for his frequent use of an archaic lexicon and obsolete structures. In an attempt to distinguish himself from early translators of Shakespeare’s plays, who mostly used a diluted variety of classical Arabic along with some colloquialisms, Mutran used an extremely classical form of Arabic. His chosen variety of standard Arabic was thought by some writers to be ‘out-of-date’. One such writer was Mikha‘il Nu‘ayma, who published an article in 1927 on Mutran’s 1922 translation of The Merchant of Venice where he criticised Mutran’s use of the strangest and most archaic of Arabic words at the expense of an accurate rendering of the original.66 What Nu‘ayma says about Mutran’s Merchant of Venice is equally true of the latter’s translations of Othello, Hamlet and Macbeth. Mutran’s tendency to use archaic words and obsolete structures goes hand in hand with his reliance on footnotes to gloss such unfamiliar uses of language.67 Despite the ‘linguistic ageing’ of Mutran’s translations, most Egyptian theatre makers were keen to use them in their performances. The paradox of the culturally prestigious and symbolically ‘living’ name of Mutran and the outdated character of his translations has proven problematic for theatre makers who used his translations, at least since the 1960s. Mutran’s name guaranteed sufficient success for any performance: one performance of Macbeth in the theatrical season of 1962/63, based on Mutran’s translation and directed by Nabil al-Alfi at the National Theatre, ran for twenty-­six nights.68 At that time this was seen as a reasonable success, compared with such other performances presented during the same season, such as Lutfi al-Khuli’s al-Qadiyya (The Case), which ran for five nights, and Tawfiq al-Hakim’s al-Safqa (The Deal), which ran for only two nights.69 However, while most theatre makers were keen on investing in the name of Mutran by basing their performances on his trans-



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lations, a few theatre directors and theatre critics have recently questioned the relevance and accessibility of his translations for theatregoers. When the theatre critic Nehad Selaiha remembers in a review of a new version of Othello an early 1960s performance of the same play starring the Egyptian actor Hamdi Ghayth, she describes Mutran’s version, which was used in that performance, as a ‘recondite classical Arabic translation’ which gave Ghayth ‘ample opportunity to flex his declamatory muscles’. What has remained of this experience, as she explains, ‘is an impression of heroic bombast and grandiloquent pathos’.70 Mildly critical of the 1960s performance based on Mutran’s translation, Selaiha is unreservedly critical of a 2002 performance based on the same translation. The 2002 performance was directed by Mohammad al-Khuli for Al-Hanager Theatre and highlights the dilemma of a theatre director who is lured by the ‘living’ symbolic power of Mutran’s name, but is unable to bring his linguistically ‘ageing’ translation to life. Conscious of the dilemma of choosing a translation produced in 1912 to stage for an audience in 2002, Selaiha describes al-Khuli’s choice of Mutran’s ‘unwieldy, bombastic translation’ as ‘unfortunate’. Assuming that Mutran’s name would make up for the limitations of the translation, the director set out to update some of the archaic words and reword some of the ‘heavily rhetorical passages in commonplace, often banal language’. The result, according to Selaiha, was that he presented the audience with ‘a disconcerting verbal patchwork’ that involved both ‘the spuriously sublime and turgidly grandiloquent’ and ‘the pompously ridiculous and flatly mundane’. Selaiha stresses the irrelevance of Mutran’s translation of Othello for contemporary theatregoers and argues that the director could have avoided this situation by choosing a more recent translation.71 Despite the iconic status of Mutran’s translations, mainly because of the significant symbolic capital he enjoyed in the cultural field not only as a translator but also as a poet and cultural innovator, new generations of Shakespeare translators have emerged since the 1950s and tried in their own ways to render his translations obsolete. Translators including Muhammad Farid Abu Hadid, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, Muhammad Mustafa Badawi and Mohamed Enani, among others, have striven to show that Mutran’s work is an outcome of and response to its own time. The presupposition underlying the new versions of Shakespeare is twofold: Mutran’s translations were

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defective in certain respects and the alternative translations are in the position of performing new functions in the target culture that Mutran’s translations cannot perform. Sameh Hanna is a lecturer in Arabic Literature and Translation and the director of the Arabic, Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies Department at University of Leeds. After completing his PhD at University of Manchester on the sociological reading of the Arabic translations of Shakespeare’s tragedies, he joined University College London (UCL) as an Andrew Mellon postdoctoral fellow in the humanities. His book, Bourdieu in Translation Studies: The Socio-cultural Dynamics of Shakespeare Translation in Egypt was published with Routledge in 2016. His current research interest is in the socio-cultural histories of Arabic translations/adaptations/rewritings of such canonical texts as Shakespeare’s work and the Bible.

Notes 1. Muhammad Taymur was born to a wealthy and well educated family in Cairo. His father was the writer and scholar Ahmad Taymur (1871–1930) and his aunt was the pioneer woman poet, writer and feminist ‘Aisha al-Taymuriyya (1840–1902). Muhammad Taymur wrote and published poetry, although his name is more associated in the history of modern Arabic literature with writing short stories and plays. He practised acting himself and played a key role in establishing the foundations of Arabic theatre criticism through the reviews and articles he wrote for al-Sufur and al-Minbar magazines. 2. These articles were later collected in a book which was published posthumously; see Muhammad Taymur, Hayatuna al-Tamthiliyya [Our Theatrical Practice] (Cairo: Matba‘at al-I‘timad, 1922), 47–112. 3. In the fourth of this series of articles Taymur lists eleven names of playwrights and translators as defendants, including himself, and promises to detail the trial proceedings of all defendants as he saw them in his fictional dream. Due to other commitments and to his premature death a year later, he only wrote about the trial of four persons: Farah Antun, Lutfi Jum‘a, Ibrahim Ramzi and Khalil Mutran. 4. Taymur, Hayatuna al-Tamthiliyya, 77. All translations from Arabic are mine, unless otherwise noted. 5. Taymur, Hayatuna al-Tamthiliyya, 84. 6. Though most historians suggest that Nahda spans the second half of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth, no fixed dates are given for the beginning and end of this era. Paul Starkey suggests as an ‘end-date’ the 1920s when ‘most of the initial problems involved in adapting Western literary forms for use in an Arabic context had been tackled’. Muhammad M. Badawi,



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likewise, historicises the period of Nahda, which he alternatively terms ‘the age of translation and adaptation’, in literary terms; he sets the year 1834 as its beginning, when al-Tahtawi’s account of his trip to France was published, and the year 1914 as its end, when significant original literary works by Egyptian authors replaced direct emulation of Western literary forms. See Paul Starkey, ‘al-Nahda’ in Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature, ed. J. S. Meisami and Paul Starkey (London: Routledge, 1998), 574, and Muhammad M. Badawi, A Short History of Modern Arabic Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 11. 7. Despite all the efforts of Muhammad ‘Ali and his successors in developing education, illiteracy in Egypt stood at 91.7 per cent by 1881 and at 93 per cent by 1908. See Sabry Hafez, The Genesis of Arabic Narrative Discourse: A Study in the Sociology of Modern Arabic Literature (London: Saqi Books, 1993), 661 and Ehud R. Toledano, ‘Social and Economic Change in the “Long Nineteenth Century”’ in The Cambridge History of Egypt 2: Modern Egypt, From 1517 to the End of the Twentieth Century, ed. M.W. Daly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 279. 8. Levantines had been immigrating to Egypt since the eighteenth century, though their number significantly increased in the second half of the nineteenth century. See Thomas Philipp, The Syrians in Egypt: 1725–1975 (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1985). 9. Philipp, The Syrians in Egypt, 82. 10. The first play by Shakespeare to be translated into Arabic was Romeo and Juliet. In an issue of al-Rawi review dated 1 April 1890 we read that al-Tamthil al‘Arabi troupe would open with three new performances, two of which were by Najib al-Haddad (1867–1899), namely Shuhada’ al-Gharam [Martyrs of Love] and al-Raja’ ba‘da al-Ya‘s [Hope After Despair]. See Tawthiq al-Masrah al-Misri, vol. 1 [Documentation of Egyptian Theatre] (Cairo: al-Markaz al-Qawmi lil-Masrah wa al-­Musiqa wa al-Funun al-Sha‘biyya, 1999), 125. Shuhada’ al-Gharam was al-Haddad’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and was posthumously published in 1901 under the title Shuhada’ al-Gharam, aw Shaqa’ al-Muhibin (Martyrs of Love, or The Misery of Lovers). See Mahmoud F. Alshetawi, ‘Shakespeare’s Journey Into the Arab World: An Initial Bibliography’, in Shakespeare and Spain: A Publication of the Shakespeare Yearbook, vol. 13, ed. José Manuel Gonzalez (New York and Ontario: The Edwin Mellen Press), 489. For a detailed discussion of al-Haddad’s version of Romeo and Juliet see Mark Bayer’s article in the current issue. 11. Alshetawi, ‘Shakespeare’s Journey Into the Arab World’, 490, 484. 12. A reprint edition of this translation was published in 2005 with an introduction. See Sameh Fekry, ‘Introduction’, in Riwayat Hamlit al-Tamthiliyya [The Play of Hamlet] (Cairo: al-Majlis al-A‘la lil-Thaqafa, 2005). 13. It is hard to establish which source text or edition ‘Abdu worked from, although it is most likely that he translated from a French version. All of his other translation output is known to be from French. 14. Endings of plays seem to have been especially important for both producers and consumers of theatre in Egypt since its inception. The fact that the ending highlights, from the point of view of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Egyptian audience, the ultimate moral of the show, made the success or failure of the whole theatrical piece dependent on it. Producers and translators of theatre had to make sure the endings of their plays would go in line with both the aesthetic expectations and social norms of their audience, otherwise the production

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would be doomed to failure. Two examples from the theatrical tradition in Egypt can be cited. The first is Safsaf, a performance written and produced by Ya‘qub Sannu‘ (1839–1912) in which the title heroine, Safsaf, is a coquette who flirts with two young men at the same time. Sannu‘ thought that the right ending for the play was to have Safsaf deserted by her two lovers as a kind of punishment for her social and moral misbehaviour. The audience thought otherwise: rather than allowing her to remain unmarried, marrying Safsaf off to someone would, from the point of view of the audience, ensure that she was prevented from behaving immorally and would also protect other young men from being seduced by her. The audience, as related by al-Ra‘i (1968), threatened to boycott the play unless Sannu‘ changed the ending. Sannu‘ ultimately gave in and added a concluding scene where Safsaf is granted the more socially respectable title of ‘wife’. The second example is Najib al-Haddad’s Arabisation of Hugo’s Hernani, which was staged by the troupe of Iskandar Farah in 1900. Instead of ending the play with Hernani (Arabised as Hemdan) committing suicide by taking poison, al-Haddad had him marry the Spanish Princess. The unhappy ending, ­particularly ­committing suicide, would not have gone down well with the audience in terms of both their aesthetic and religious codes. See ‘Ali al-Ra‘i, Al-Kumidya al-­Murtajala fi al-Masrah al-Misri [Improvised Comedy in Egyptian Theatre] (Cairo: Dar al-Hilal, 1968). 15. For a detailed discussion of Tanyus ‘Abdu’s translation, see Sameh F. Hanna, ‘Hamlet Lives Happily Ever After in Arabic: The Genesis of the Field of Drama Translation in Egypt’, The Translator 11.2 (2005), 167–92 and Sameh F. Hanna, Bourdieu in Translation Studies: The Socio-cultural Dynamics of Shakespeare Translation in Egypt (New York: Routledge, 2016). 16. Shaykh Salama Hijazi decided the fate of whole theatre troupes, especially as he moved from one troupe to another before he formed his own in 1905. For details on his place in turn-of-the-century Egyptian theatre, see Pierre Cachia, An Overview of Modern Arabic Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 127. When he was paralysed towards the end of his life, ‘he was carried onto the stage to sing the highlights’, while ‘another actor substituted for him in connecting scenes’ (ibid.). 17. See Muhammad Yusif Najm, Al-Masrahiyya f i al-Adab al-‘Arabi al-Hadith: 1847–1914 [The Play in Modern Arabic Literature: 1847–1914] (Beirut: Dar Beirut lil-Tiba‘a wa al-Nashr, 1956), 260. 18. This poem was later anthologised in a collection of less known poems by Shawqi. See Ahmad Shawqi, ‘‘Ala Lisan Hamlit’ [As Said By Hamlet], in Al-Shawqiyyat al-Majhula [Lesser Known Poems by Shawqi], ed. Muhammad Sabri al-Surbuni (Beirut: Dar al-Masira, 1979), 42. 19. Publishing drama translation at that time was not financially profitable unless the translation in question had previously been staged, and had gained a minimum of popularity, or was produced by a prominent writer. Indeed, the majority of translators who published drama translation for the first time had to cover the publishing expenses themselves. 20. Muhammad ‘Iffat, Riwayat Makbith [The Play of Macbeth] (Cairo: Matba‘at al-­ Muqattam, 1911). Emphasis added. The line of dedication reads in Arabic as follows:



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21. Sami al-Juraydini, Riwayat Hamlet li-Shakespeare [The Play of Hamlet by Shakespeare] (Cairo: al-Matba‘a al-Rahmaniyya, 1922), 8. 22. Unfortunately when ‘Abd al-Rahman Rushdi produced this translation he lifted out whole scenes and distorted al-Sharif ’s. Al-Sharif had to write an article in al-Ahram newspaper, published in 22 April 1918, in which he defended his version and distanced himself from the stage version produced by Rushdi. For Hasan al-Sharif’s article see Tawthiq al-Masrah al-Misri, vol. 8 (2001), 231–33. 23. Su‘ad Abyad, Jurj Abyad: al-Masrah al-Misri fi Ma’at ‘Am [Jurj Abyad: Egyptian Theatre in one Hundred Years] (Cairo: Dar al-Ma‘arif, 1970), 115. 24. Tawthiq al-Masrah al-Misri, vol. 6 (1998), 23. 25. Ibid., 29. 26. These ingredients always featured in advertisements by musical and comedy troupes at the time. 27. Tawthiq al-Masrah al-Misri, vol. 6 (1998), 53. 28. Nevill Barbour, ‘The Arabic Theatre in Egypt’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies, University of London 8.1, 173–87. 29. This was the term used by theatre critic Muhammad Taymur in contradistinction with other forms of theatre at the time like musical theatre and ‘slapstick theatre’ (al-masrah al-hazli), Taymur, Hayatuna al-Tamthiliyya, 87. 30. Starting from his second theatrical season Abyad employed a number of strategies for his theatre to appeal to a wider constituency of Egyptian theatregoers. First, he commissioned translations of plays where the leading role is not that of a notable or a person with a high social status as was the case with Oedipus, Louis XI and Othello, which he presented in his first season. He staged for this purpose two texts by Victor Hugo, both translated by Ilyas Fayyad: one was al-Ahdab (The Hunchback), a dramatisation of Notre-Dame de Paris, and the other Mudhik al-Malik (The King’s Jester), a translation of Le Roi s’amuse. The second strategy Abyad used in order to appeal to a wider audience involved staging translations in colloquial Egyptian. Still keen on maintaining the position he occupied in the field of theatre production as the producer of serious and artistic theatre, he used the much respected translations of Molière’s L’École des maris, L’École des femmes and Le Tartuffe by Muhammad ‘Uthman Jalal. Third, he was in the position of having to use some of the elements of commercial theatre which he previously refrained from such as music and dance. Starting from his second season he reintroduced some of these elements in his performances. As we understand from Taymur’s fictional trial of Egyptian playwrights and drama translators, Mutran must have rejected Abyad’s compromises and decided to publish his version of Othello in 1912. 31. Muhammad ‘Iffat, the translator of The Tempest (1909) and Macbeth (1911), was a judge in civil courts, while Sami al-Juraydini, the translator of Julius Caesar (1912) and Hamlet (1922/32), Ilyas Fayyad and Isma‘il Wahbi were lawyers. Niqula Fayyad, the translator of a French play with the Arabic title al-Khida‘ wa al-Hub (Deception and Love, 1912), was trained as a doctor. Examples of university professors include Muhammad Hamdi and Husayn Ramzi. Examples of government officials include Ibrahim Ramzi, the translator of King Lear (1932), who worked for some time as a technical translator in the ministry of agriculture, and Mutran himself who took up in 1912 a post as a secretary in the Khedivial Agricultural Syndicate.

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32. The term ‘field’ is used here in the Bourdieusian sense to mean a specific social space involving two opposed groups of culture producers: one produces culture for financial profit and the other produces culture for symbolic capital in the form of recognition and canonisation. For a detailed discussion of the concept of field and its implications for the study of cultural production, see Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993). On the implications of the concept of field and Bourdieu’s sociology in general for the study of translation, see Moira Inghilleri, ed., Bourdieu and the Sociology of Translation and Interpreting, a special issue of The Translator 11.2 (2005). 33. This is also how he was described in an advertisement of the translation published in Misr newspaper on 10 August 1912. See Tawthiq al-Masrah al-Misri, vol. 6 (1998), 67. On the cover of the third edition of the translation, published in 1928, he adds to his name the Turkish honorary title ‘Bek’ and writes underneath ‘Head of the Higher School of Commerce and previously a teacher of translation at the Higher School of Teachers’. See Muhamma Hamdi, Riwayat Yulyus Qaysar [The Play of Julius Caesar] (Cairo: Maktabat Matba‘at Misr, 1912/1928). 34. See the cover of this published translation in Sayyid ‘Ali Isma‘il, Masirat al-Masrah fi Misr: al-Juz’ al-Awal [Trajectory of Theatre in Egypt: Part One] (Cairo: al-Hay’a al-Misriyya al-‘Ama lil-Kitab, 2003), 174. 35. For a theoretical discussion of the forms of capital culture producers employ and seek to accumulate within fields of cultural production, see Pierre Bourdieu, ‘The Forms of Capital’, in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. J. G. Richardson (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), 241–58 and for a detailed discussion of the dynamics of capital accumulation in the field of drama translation, see Hanna, Towards a Sociology of Drama Translation. 36. ‘Iffat, Riwayat Makbith. ‘Pasha’ was a distinguished honorary title granted by the viceroy of Egypt to notables and men of distinction. 37. Muhammad ‘Iffat, Zawba‘at al-Bahr [The Tempest] (Cairo: al-Matba‘a al-­ ‘Umumiyya, 1909). 38. Ibid., i. 39. See Khalil Mutran, ‘Introduction’, ‘Utayl [Othello] (Cairo: Matba‘at al-Ma‘arif, 1912), 9. 40. See Muhammad Hamdi, ‘Preface’, in Riwayat Yulyus Qaysar, 3. 41. Cited in Najm, Al-Masrahiyya fi al-Adab al-’Arabi al-Hadith, 252. 42. Hamdi, ‘Preface’, 4. 43. For details on Mutran’s opposition to the Ottoman authority, see Mounah Khoury, Poetry and the Making of Modern Egypt (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1971). 44. ‘Abd al-Rahman Sidqi, ‘Khalil Mutran wa al-Masrah’ [Khalil Mutran and Theatre], in Mihrajan Khalil Mutran [Khalil Mutran’s Festival] (Cairo: al-Majlis al-A‘la li-Ri‘ayat al-Funun wa al-Adab wa al-‘Ulum al-Ijtima‘iyya, 1960), 44, 50. 45. See Khalil Mutran, ‘Introduction’, in ‘Utayl [Othello] (Cairo: Matba‘at al-Ma‘arif, 1912), 3–9. 46. Taymur, Hayatuna al-Tamthiliyya, 145–6. 47. Khalil Mutran, ‘Introduction’, in Hamlet (Cairo: Dar al-Ma‘arif, 1917/1976), 5. 48. Tawthiq al-Masrah al-Misri, vol. 6 (1998), 100. In its issue dated 6 January 1913, al-Watan newspaper reports that the Egyptian Ministry of the Interior ordered Jurj Abyad to suspend performances of the play of al-Sahira [The Witch] due to complaints from heads of religious communities against the content of the play.



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49. Mutran, ‘Introduction’, in ‘Utayl, 8. The Arabic original of this passage reads:

50. Yasir Suleiman, The Arabic Language and Identity: A Study in Ideology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003), 10. For a detailed discussion of the politics of fusha (Classical Arabic) and ‘ammiyya (colloquial Arabic) in the Egyptian context, see Niloofar Haeri, Sacred Language, Ordinary People (New York: Palgrave Mac­ millan, 2003); Nafusa Zakariyya Sa‘id, Tarikh al-Da‘wa ila al-‘Amiyya wa Athariha fi Misr [History of the Call for the Vernacular and Its Impacts in Egypt] (Cairo: Dar al-Ma‘arif, 1964/1980); and chapter 3 in Yasir Suleiman, A War of Words: Language and Conflict in the Middle East (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 51. Cited and translated in Khouri, Poetry and the Making of Modern Egypt, 144. 52. Ta‘rib (Arabisation) and tamsir (Egyptianisation), the two major translation strategies used by translators of literature, and drama in particular, in Egypt in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, meant, as Cachia (An Overview of Modern Arabic Literature, 36) explains, more than using Standard Arabic or the Egyptian vernacular. They both implied domesticating the source text, and giving the translation a local colour. However, domestication was not uniformly used by all translators during that period. For instance, whereas ‘Arabisation’ for some translators meant radical change of the plot of a dramatic text and the transposition of its thematic structure into an Arab environment, for others ‘Arabization’ was exercised more subtly at the level of language, and indirectly through paratextual references, such as prefaces and notes to translations. In contrast with the first generation of drama translators in Egypt, who manipulated the overall structures of dramatic texts, Mutran’s Arabisation was employed mainly at the linguistic and paratextual levels. 53. Multan, ‘Introduction’, in ’Utayl, 7. 54. Ibid., 8. The Arabic original reads:

55. Ibid., 3–4. 56. Ibid., 7–8. The Arabic original reads:

57. See Ferial Ghazoul, ‘The Arabization of Othello’, Comparative Literature 50.1 (1998), 2. 58. All references to Shakespeare’s texts discussed in this study are from the Arden editions. The editions used are Othello, ed. E. A. J. Honigmann (1999/2002); Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins (1982/2001); King Lear, ed. R. A. Foakes (1997/2002); and Macbeth, ed. by Kenneth Muir (1951/2002). It is believed that Mutran used a French translation, which he does not cite. 59. Mutran, ’Utayl, 29–30 (emphasis added). It is noteworthy that Mutran did not write his translation in verse, neither did he use the rhyming prose (saj‘) which was characteristic of both literary and theatre translations at the time. The only reason that might explain this is that he was producing this translation for the troupe of the actor and director Jurj Abyad who, unlike all the other leading actors

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of the time, was not a singer and did not have a singer in his troupe at the time of staging Othello. Rhyming prose and versified speech were characteristic of the stage translations specifically produced for actor-singers like Shaykh Salama Hijazi (1855–1917). Though unversified, Mutran maintained in his translations all the qualities of classical literary Arabic, at the level of lexis, syntax and style. All further references to this work are within the text, cited by page number. 60. Shakespeare, Othello, IV.i.35–7. 61. See Anonymous, Riwayat Utillo, aw Hiyyal al-Rijal [The Play of Othello, or the Trickeries of Men] (Cairo: al-Maktaba al-Mamlukiyya, n.d), 32. Najm, Al-Masrahiyya fi al-Adab al-‘Arabi al-Hadith, 243 indicates that this version was popular during the end of the nineteenth century, while Alshetawi says that it was published in 1907. In all cases all commentators agree that this was the earliest versions of Othello in Arabic. 62. See Mustapha Safouan, Masrahiyyat ‘Utayl [The Play of ‘Utayl] (Cairo: Maktabat al-Anglo al-Misriyya, 1998), 5–15. For a detailed comparative study of Mutran’s and Safouan’s versions of Othello, see Sameh F. Hanna, ‘Othello in Egypt: Translation and the (Un)making of National Identity’, in Translation and the Construction of Identity, eds Juliane House, M. Rosario Martin Ruano and Nicole Baumgarten (Seoul: IATIS, 2005), 109–28. 63. Shakespeare, Othello, I.iii.49–50. 64. ‘Daydamura’ is Mutran’s Arabic transliteration of ‘Desdemona’. 65. Shakespeare, Othello, IV.ii.84 (emphasis added). 66. See Mikha’il Nu‘ayma, al-Ghirbal (Beirut: Mu’asasat Nawfal, 1927/1981). 67. This use of footnotes constitutes an act of intralingual translation. 68. For detailed statistics of the performances presented in Egyptian theatres during the period from 1952 to 1966, see the special issue of Al-Masrah, published in July 1966. 69. Al-Qadiyya was directed by ‘Abd al-Rihim al-Zurqani and al-Safqa by Fattuh Nashati. 70. See Nehad Selaiha, ‘The Moor in Mansura’, Al-Ahram Weekly, 13–19 April 2000. Available at (last accessed 8 June 2007). 71. See Nehad Selaiha, ‘Put out the Light’, Al-Ahram Weekly, 11–17 July 2002. Available at (last accessed 8 June 2007).

& Chapter 3

On Translating Shakespeare’s Sonnets into Arabic Mohamed Enani

A puzzle: why should all translators the world over and down the centuries translate verse into verse, while we Arabs, who boast a rich tradition of verse, use prose to render Shakespeare’s sonnets? After many decades in which Shakespeare’s Arab readers and translators paid relatively little attention to the sonnets, the past generation has brought a flurry of efforts. About six translations of the sonnets, each nearly complete, have appeared since the 1980s.1 Each one tries to reproduce the form of the sonnet, translating some many times, like sonnet 18, and omitting others, such as the notorious 135 and 136. But they are mostly in prose, with the exception of the last (my own, 2016). In the days of the Apollo School (1932–1934), verse was rendered in verse and readers expected translated poetry to sound poetic in Arabic. However, Egyptian translators of the sonnets, especially Badr Tawfiq, who had been an army officer before acquiring a working knowledge of English, helped to re-establish the practice Notes for this section begin on page 75.

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of ­translating verse into prose. In the hands of a gifted writer, that practice could produce readable translations, when the rhythm of the prose is attractive enough to compensate for the loss of metre and rhyme. However, Tawfiq was a mediocre poet in Arabic, and his prose translation of the sonnets seemed to tell his readers that there was nothing to be gained aesthetically from reading the sonnets. Twenty-first-century translators have produced more accurate sonnets than Tawfiq’s error-riddled version. Among these was Ismat Walley, a lecturer in English at Alexandria University, in 2005. Syrian-­born UK-based scholar Kamal Abu-Deeb produced his own version of the sonnets, with an extensive introduction and notes. The basic problem persisted, however, as the reading public was called upon to believe that Arabic prose was in fact English poetry. Dr Na‘eem ‘Atiyyah, a brilliant translator from Greek, put it succinctly: why spend three days translating a poem into verse, when you can do it in prose in three minutes? My own answer is that I would rather extend my joy in reading, re-reading the foreign poem until it turned itself into an Arabic poem, no matter how many days this process took. The joy of assimilation and reproduction is its own reward. If you think you can do better things with your time than translating verse into verse, do something else! But if you are a poet and enjoy the poetry of the masters, you will seek the joy of identifying with them, even at the level of each individual poem. My whole summer of 2015 was well-spent in producing my verse translations, coupled with an introduction based again on joyful scholarship, as were my notes. In what follows, I will illustrate two types of challenges this task entailed, one thematic and tonal, the other formal, by annotating my own translations of sonnets 127, 152, 143, 142, 73, 97 and 18.

Gender and Tone Shakespeare’s wit is a life-source in the sonnets, engendering a complexity of tone almost totally unknown in Arabic poetry before Salah ‘Abd al-Sabur. For instance, 126 of the sonnets are addressed to a male beloved and the rest of the 154 to a mysterious dark lady. A modernist will tell you that here we have the spirit of modernism, where gender barriers break down and love is regarded as a supreme emotion, explored in itself as a human value, liberated from the usual specificity of the sexual drive. A post-modernist may add that this body of verse heralds a celebration in art not of order but of



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chaos.2 However, such a complexity of tone is not simply an implicit attack on heteronormativity or a defence of any simple sexual orientation. The problem is that both the modernist and post-modernist read the sonnets with high seriousness, ignoring the subtle irony born of the poet’s inveterate wit. Closely examined, the sonnets will reveal that love may indeed be a supreme human passion, but it is not an absolute value in whatever form you choose: the object of the poet’s love in the first 126 sonnets, like the object of his love in the rest of the sonnets, is at once idolized and degraded. Seen together, the sonnets raise beauty to a height unattained until the Romantics3 but couple it with qualities usually attributed to the lowest of the low. Above all, here we have an oblique negation of the association of ‘truth’ and ‘beauty’ – as Keats will insist in his ‘Ode to a Nightingale’. A look at Shakespeare’s use of the word ‘fair’ can highlight the complexity of his tone and the translation challenge it presents. In Sonnet 127, the poet distinguishes ‘fair’ from ‘beautiful’: In the old age black was not counted fair, Or if it were it bore not beauty’s name, But now is black beauty’s successive heir, And beauty slandered with a bastard shame.

How do you translate both words into Arabic so as to distinguish the sense of beauty denied a dark complexion? A swarthy face, like that of his dark lady, he considers ‘fair’, acknowledging that now her ‘fairness’ may be called beauty, as traditionally beautiful girls use cosmetics and falsify their natural beauty by such ‘bastard’ colours and embellishments. Beauty, the poet seems to suggest, is purely physical while fairness is more than physical: the subjective element in the latter seems to have enabled the swarthy face to look, even physically, attractive. The word ‘fair’ means many things, apart from its physical meaning of white skin and blond hair: its abstract qualities associate it with good, or goodness, with the prime sense of ‘just’ or ‘righteous’. This gives us the Arabic ( ) [ḥusn], the lemma for words like ( ) [ḥassanah] a righteous deed, and ( ) [ḥasnā’] pretty, beautiful or FAIR! Meanwhile, beauty in Arabic is ( ) [jamāl] originally deriving from ( ) [jamal] – a camel!4 Hence my solution, in rhyme and rhythm: ‫ان الخَالِى‬ ِ ‫ تَحْ ِم ُل ال ُحسْنَ فى ال َّز َم‬ ‫ال‬ ِ ‫ َح َجبُوا َع ْنهُ َوصْ فَهُ بال َج َم‬ ‫ال‬ ِ ‫ش ُكلِّ َج َم‬ ِ ْ‫ َو ِريثًا لِ َعر‬ َ َ ْ ْ‫ص‬ ‫َال‬ ‫غ‬ ‫ن‬ ‫كاأل‬ ‫اغ‬ ‫ب‬ ِ ِ َ ‫ ِم ْن بَهَا ِء األ‬

‫لَ ْم تَ ُك ْن ُس ْم َرةُ ال ُوجُو ِه لَ َد ْينَا‬ ‫وإ َذا َع َّدهَا أُنَاسُ ُح ْسنًا‬ ْ ‫ل ِك ْن اآلنَ أَصْ بَ َح‬ ‫ت ُس ْم َرةُ ال َوجْ ِه‬ ‫صا َر ال َج َما ُل يَحْ ِم ُل عَارًا‬ َ ‫بَلْ و‬

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Sonnet 152 (‘In loving thee thou know’st I am forsworn’) gives us an instance of ‘wit’ that produces an ironic tone of the first order. The poet who, in Sonnet 116, raises love to the highest pinnacle of idealism, who talks forever about constancy in love [truth] and the value of ‘true love’ as an absolute human value, understandably attacking both his sweethearts for being unfaithful to him, now shocks us with his admission that he himself has perjured twenty oaths, never really being ‘constant’. A modernist critic will tell you this is poetry: it is poetry of the third voice as distinguished by T.S. Eliot. But is it really a mask? Do we have a persona here as we have in, say, the dramatic monologues of Browning? Do we take him seriously when he thus accuses himself of being many times unfaithful? The trick is a strange one: we are told initially that to swear by his beloved’s beauty is to swear a ‘wrong’ oath, in as much as loving her is a lie, because her physical beauty and her moral qualities are all false. His oath is therefore inevitably wrong, hence perjured, but the first quatrain has more to shock us with: his sweetheart is married and had already perjured the first oath when she swore her second oath of love to him! The second quatrain almost creates a persona difficult to identify with the poet, or indeed with any single person: lovers are unfaithful because their eyes lie to them, suggesting that physical beauty entails moral rectitude or constancy. The original perjury is therefore that of the eye. This is what we understand as we move from the personal pronoun of the speaker to the objective description of what the eyes do. This second crux contains the problematic word ‘truth’, which normally means constant or faithful in Shakespeare, but which acquires here the regular meaning of being the opposite of a lie. One word in Arabic will never do. To render the full meaning of the word, occurring twice in lines 10 and 14, I have combined the two senses in line 10, then specified the meaning of telling the truth only in line 14: ‫ بالصدق واإلخالص روح الحقيقة‬.. ‫وأيمان أخرى بحبك‬ ‫وحتى أنير طريقك كنت أكف البصر‬ ‫وأدعو العيون لتنكر ما قد يراه النظر‬ ‫فانى حلفت بحسنك والعين حانثة خرقاء‬ ‫ ولكنها كذبة نكراء‬.. ‫فقد أقسمت أنها صادقة‬



On Translating Shakespeare’s Sonnets into Arabic

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Rhyme and Metre The sonnet’s rhyme and metre present further challenges. While the fourteen-line structure is part of a European tradition that can be kept in the translation, the rhyme scheme is not. When rewriting an English poem as an Arabic poem, one is governed essentially by the tradition of the target language: the reader must feel that he or she is reading a poem as defined by the Arabic tradition (hence Arabic metrics) with rhyme as defined in Arabic. Variation here is allowed: if the rhyme scheme is the same as in Shakespeare, well and good; but if the rewriting moment naturally brings about a more genuinely Arabic rhyme scheme, then why reject it? The process is closer to re-creation than to producing a mirror image of the form: occasionally the fourteen lines become more or less, as the poetic intuition of that ‘moment’ dictates. Next comes the choice of metre. Here I insist that it is never a conscious ‘choice’: the poem as assimilated chooses its own metre, and the variety of Shakespeare’s rhythms is reflected in the Arabic metre used. In sonnet 143, Shakespeare’s rhythm is brisk, and the lilt overpowering. The sonnet creates a domestic image of a housewife trying to catch a young ‘cockerel’, which runs away, but in the process ignores her little child, a toddler, who tries to join her, crying aloud and screaming. That is, a sweetheart is chasing after someone she wants, neglecting the ‘poet’ (her lover) who is in turn chasing after her. The quick movement is reflected in the metre, with varied rhyme schemes in Arabic. Here is the English sonnet: 143 Lo, as a careful housewife runs to catch One of her feathered creatures broke away, Sets down her babe and makes all swift dispatch In pursuit of the thing she would have stay. Whilst her neglected child holds her in chase, Cries to catch her whose busy care is bent To follow that which flies before her face, Not prizing her poor infant’s discontent; So runn’st thou after that which flies from thee, Whilst I, thy babe, chase thee afar behind. But if thou catch thy hope, turn back to me And play the mother’s part: kiss me, be kind.     So will I pray that thou mayst have thy Will,     If thou turn back and my loud crying still.

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And the Arabic version: ‫اجنِهَا‬ َ ‫َى تُ ْد ِر‬ ٍ ‫َع َجبًا! ه ِذى َربَّةُ بَ ْي‬ َ ‫ك بَع‬ ْ ‫ت تَجْ ِرى ك‬ ِ ‫ْض َد َو‬ ْ ‫ار الطَّائِ ِر ِم ْن يَ ِدهَا‬ ‫ر‬ ‫ف‬ ‫د‬ ‫ع‬ ‫ب‬ ‫ى‬ ‫ه‬ َ ِ ‫ِم ْن َذا‬ ِ ِّ‫ت الر‬ ِ َ ِ َ ِ ‫يش ال َّزا‬ ُ ‫ك تَ ْت ُر‬ ‫ق بِ ْه‬ َ ‫كى ت َْل َح‬ َ ِ‫ولِذل‬ ْ ً‫ْر َعة‬ ِ ‫ك طَ ْف ًل تَحْ ِملُهُ ُمس‬ ْ ْ ُ‫إذ تَرْ غَب‬. ‫أن يَ ْبقَى الطَّائِ ُر فى بَ ْيتِ ْه‬ ِّ ‫لكنَّ ال‬ ‫ار ُدهَا‬ َ ‫ط ْف َل ال َم ْترُو‬ ِ َ‫ك يُتَابِ ُعهَا ويُط‬ ‫ح‬ ‫ي‬ ‫ص‬ ‫ي‬ ‫و‬ ‫ى‬ ‫بَلْ يَ ْب ِك‬ ُ‫ك َم ْن تُ ْه ِملُه‬ ُ َ ‫لكى يُ ْد ِر‬ ْ ِ َ ُ ِ‫ار َد َم ْن يُ ْفل‬ ‫او ُغهَا‬ ِ ‫ت ِم ْنهَا ويُ َر‬ ِ َ‫لِتُط‬ ِّ ‫ب ال‬ ُ‫ط ْف ِل وتُ ْغفِلُه‬ َ ِ‫وبذل‬ َ ‫ك تَتَ َجاهَ ُل قِي َمةَ َغ‬ ِ ‫ض‬ ‫ب ِم ْن يَ ِد ِك‬ ِ ‫ار‬ ِ ‫وعلَى ه َذا النَّحْ ِو أَ َر‬ ِ َ‫اك ت َِج ِّدينَ َو َرا َء اله‬ ‫وأَنَا ِط ْفلُ ِك أَجْ ِرى خ َْلفَ ِك وعلَى َم ْب َع َد ٍة ِم ْنك‬ ْ ‫ُك ب َم ْن ت‬ ً‫َطلُبُ ُمرْ هَقَة‬ ْ ‫إن ظَفَ َر‬ ْ ‫لكن‬ ْ ِ ‫ت يَد‬ ْ ‫لى‬ ً‫والتَفِتِى ُم ْشفِقَة‬ ِ ‫عُو ِدى‬ ً‫ت ُم ْغ ِرقَة‬ ٍ ‫َل ِعبَةً دَوْ َر األُ ِّم َم ِعى ُم ْم ِط َرةً قُب َُل‬ ْ ‫وإ َذ ْن أَ ْدعُــو الله إلَى‬ ‫ــالى‬ ِ ‫وزينَ بِشَا ِع ِر ِك ال َح‬ ِ ُ‫أن يَجْ َعلَ ِك تَف‬ ْ ‫اخى ال َعالِى‬ ُ ‫ت‬ ِ ‫ص َر‬ ِ ‫َاج َحةً فِى إ ْسكَا‬ ِ ‫ ن‬..‫إن ت َْلتَفِتِى وتَعُو ِدى‬

My rhyme scheme follows the Shakespearean closely only in the second stanza and the couplet, but differs in the first and third stanzas, being closer to rhyming couplets. The change in the rhyme scheme from the first quatrain to the second has the ‘compensating’ feature of maintaining the rhyme of the first two lines in lines 5 and 7, and the rhyme of the third and fourth in lines 6 and 8, while in each of the first eight lines the rhyme letter in Arabic is an (H) ( ), being alternately feminine and masculine pronouns. This formal alternation reflects, almost subliminally, what we might call the dialogue of movement between the speaker and the chasing/ chased lady. Rather than giving a word-for-word rendering, the translation recreates the situation in Arabic as though the translator is watching the concrete action of the housewife rather than the poet’s report of that action. One result of this is the addition of a word here or there, such as ( ) i.e. ‘bright’, describing the bird, so that ‘feathered’, literally ( ) becomes ‘brightly feathered’, i.e. ( ). In fact the whole phrase may be removed from the Arabic text without loss to the sense, as the translator has already rendered ‘one of her feathered creatures’ as ( ) and ‘broke away’ as ( )! The reason for repeating the reference to the bird in a typical metonymy of the kind that came to be described as ‘poetic diction’ by Wordsworth is that I felt the expression was not



On Translating Shakespeare’s Sonnets into Arabic

69

a facile rhetorical device, such as calling birds ‘the feathered tribes’ and fish ‘the scaly crew’, as done by some eighteenth-century poets. Rather, the metonymy involved an image, a sunken image, describing the man sought after by the lady as having only an attractive appearance: it was that ‘bright’ appearance that had caught her eye and, as I felt, turned the metonym into a metaphor, alive enough though still sunken, by the addition of the adjective. Rhythm is part of every poem’s meaning, I have always argued, so that a change of rhythm, however apparently slight, must indicate an alteration of emphasis or, indeed, of meaning. The metre of the above-quoted sonnet, 143, called khabab ( ), is quite brisk, being somehow related to the action of running and chasing described. It is as though the movement dealt with, what may be called the ‘content’, is enforcing the rhythm, part of what we call ‘form’.

Changing the Form This idea may be better understood when we contrast sonnet 143 with the preceding one, 142, in the 1609 Quarto edition. The latter is meditative, concerned with the meanings of various aspects of the poet’s love relationship with the ‘dark lady’. This is an alternation of argument and counter-argument, which we find in many poems in the Arabic tradition. The whole structure of sonnet 142, with its many abstractions, suggests the Arabic tradition and a common metre in which similar meditations have been made; this metre is called al-khafeef, that is, the ‘light’. However, it is a composite one, not relying on the repetition of a single foot throughout. You could easily see that the sonnet is based on a dialectic, slowing down the rhythm, with the ideas jostling about here and there: 142 Love is my sin, and thy dear virtue hate, Hate of my sin, grounded on sinful loving. O, but with mine compare thou thine own state, And thou shalt find it merits not reproving, Or if it do, not from those lips of thine That have profaned their scarlet ornaments And sealed false bonds of love as oft as mine, Robbed others’ beds’ revenues of their rents. Be it lawful I love thee as thou lov’st those, Whom thine eyes woo as mine importune thee.

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Root pity in thy heart, that, when it grows Thy pity may deserve to pitied be.     If thou dost seek to have what thou dost hide,     By self example mayst thou be denied.

Here is the Arabic version: ْ‫ضــائِل‬ َ َ‫ضــا ُء أَ ْعــلَى الف‬ َ ‫ْــك البَ ْغ‬ ِ ‫ فَلَ َدي‬

ْ ‫ْك َغ َرا ِمى‬ ِ ‫إن تَ ُك ْن زَلَّتِى لَ َدي‬

ْ‫ فى َغ َر ٍام َرأَ ْيتِ ِه كال َّر َذائِل‬ ْ‫ ت َِج ِديهَا بَ ِريئَةً ال تُ َسا َءل‬ ْ ‫َان‬ ‫ت‬ ِ َ‫ َكيْفَ تَأتِى بِ ِه هُنَا ال َّشف‬ ‫ان‬ ِ ‫ان كَال َمرْ َج‬ ِ ‫ ُح ْم َرةَ الطَّ ْيلَ َس‬ ‫ت‬ ِ ‫ ك ُعقُو ِدى َكثِي َرةً زَائِفَا‬ ‫ت‬ َ ْ‫ يَ ْنتَ ِمى لِ َغي ِْر ِهنَّ ِم ْن ُمح‬ ِ ‫صنَا‬ ُ ‫ ِم ْثلَ َما تَ ْع َش‬ ْ‫ق ال ُعيُونُ ال َج َمال‬

‫ضينَ الَّ ِذى تَ ُع ِّدينَ إِ ْث ًما‬ ِ ‫تُ ْب ِغ‬ ‫ارنِى بِ َحالِ ِك َحالِى‬ ِ َ‫إنَّما ق‬ ‫وإ َذا َكانَ فِى َغ َرا ِمى َم َل ٌم‬ ْ ‫فَلَقَ ْد َدنَّ َس‬ ‫ت ِشفَاه ُِك َع ْمدًا‬ ْ ‫ولَقَ ْد أَ ْب َر َم‬ ‫ت ُعقُو َد َغ َر ٍام‬ ُ ْ َ‫و َسط‬ ‫ش‬ ٍ ‫ُور ُكلِّ فِ َرا‬ ِ ‫ت علَى أج‬ ْ ‫لى‬ ُّ‫ل‬ ‫أن أُ ِحب َّْك‬ ‫ح‬ ‫ي‬ ‫ى‬ ‫هَلْ تُ َر‬ َ ِ ِ

ْ ‫اف َم‬ ْ‫طلَبِى وال ُّسؤَال‬ ِ ‫ ِم ْثل ْإل َح‬ ُ ‫ َحي‬ ‫اق‬ ِ َ‫ْث تَ ْنمو ُش َج ْي َرةُ اإل ْشف‬ ْ َ‫ نَال‬ َ ْ ‫المآقى‬ ‫يع‬ ‫م‬ ‫ج‬ ‫ن‬ ‫م‬ ‫ف‬ ‫ط‬ ‫ع‬ ‫ال‬ ‫ت‬ َ َ ِ ِ ِ ِ

‫ق إلَ ْي ِه‬ ٍ ْ‫بَلْ وتُ ْب ِدينَ ُك َّل َشو‬ ْ ‫ا ْغ ِر ِسى فى الفُؤَا ِد بِ ْذ َرةَ ع‬ ‫ف‬ ٍ ‫َط‬ ْ ‫فَإِ َذا أَ ْث َم َر‬ ً ‫ت َحنَانًا َج ِم‬ ‫يل‬







‫ تَحْ جُبينَ ال َحنَانَ َع َّم ْن بَدَالَ ْك‬ ‫ بلْ تَ َريْنَ ال َج ِمي َع يَحْ دُو ِمثَالَ ْك‬

ْ ‫ولكن‬ ‫َان‬ ِ ‫أَ ْن‬ ِ ‫ت تَ ْس َعيْنَ لِ ْل َحن‬ ‫ولِهَ َذا فَلَ ْن تَنَالِى َحنَانًا‬

What a change, it may appear, from the sonnet form! There are only thirteen lines for the sonnet’s fourteen, and six rhymes for the sonnet’s seven, and above all, the poem looks too Arabic in idiom and structure to count as a sonnet at all! But compare the Arabic version with the so-called source text and you will realize how almost ‘literal’ the rendering is. What happens here is that the division of the first two English lines into parts, each consisting of a statement, suggests the distichs of Arabic verse, where each part of each line corresponds to a monostich, with the result that an idiomatic Arabic structure of distichs naturally appears. When, however, lines 3 and 4 in the English text constitute a conditional structure, that is, a single sentence consisting of a protasis and an apodosis, they are given in one distich. O, but with mine compare thou thine own state, And thou shalt find it merits not reproving ‫ارنِي ب َحالِ ِك َحالِي‬ ِ َ‫ إنَّما ق‬  ْ‫ت َِجديِهَا بَ ِريئَةً ال تُ َسا َءل‬

This explains, of course, why the English quatrain has produced only three distichs in Arabic, unified by a single rhyme (rather than two as in the source text).



On Translating Shakespeare’s Sonnets into Arabic

71

These changes mean that the translator looks into the words for the tone, or the attitude of the poet towards his theme: the poem is argumentative, based as it is on accusations and counter-accusations, making use of what in translation studies is called the ‘expressive text’ (operative/appellative), which relies grammatically on the subjunctive mood, not on the indicative mood of the informative text.5 There is a single verb ‘to be’ in the opening line which may mislead the translator into thinking it a declarative statement; in fact, coupled with the rest of the quatrain (and the poem), it suggests the existence of an unspoken ‘while’ or ‘if’. This connects naturally with the resumed syntax in line 5 ‘Or if it do’, then with the opening of line 9, ‘Be it …’. Thus the whole poem is seen as a unified argument, rising to a climax, and it is here that I have allowed myself to benefit from the useful device (especially in Arabic) of explicitation. The poet tells his beloved that she seeks that which she denies everybody, relying on the explicit references to ‘pity’, in both lines 11 and 12; but in Arabic ‘that’ is replaced by pity. The formal ‘reason’ is, of course, explicitation, but there is another, non-technical reason, namely to link the English word ‘pity’ with a whole tradition of seeking the beloved to be ‘kind’, have pity on the lover etc. – a tradition more alive in Arabic than in English. It is what, I believe, the idiomatic Arabic atmosphere requires as a coda for Shakespeare’s sonnet.

Fleeting Pleasures Finally I would like to present and comment on the translation of two famous sonnets, namely 73 and 97, as they represent what every non-specialist, or ‘lay-reader’, expects the translation of Shakespeare’s sonnets should be like, namely to be similar enough in form to the source texts. The first is sufficiently close in every respect, except in the rhyme scheme and the number of lines being fifteen, not fourteen. The metre is again different, being rajaz, which relies on the repetition of a single foot (like the khabab) except that the foot is longer and allows many modulations. The extra line occurs in the first stanza and gives us a third rhyme word. The contemplative mood is developed logically so that the reader can enjoy the variety of images built up by the poet for his ‘old’ age (by the standards of that time) – drawn first from nature, then from light, and finally from fire. The expression ‘in me’ of the first line, which is used initially in each stanza to introduce each image, is matched in the Arabic

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version by ‘Thou mayst … behold’ ( )→( )→( ). The parallelism establishes the change from one image to the next. The couplet too is linked by a similar clause, ‘This thou perceiv’st’ ( ), leading naturally to the point of the sonnet: To love that well, which thou must leave ere long ْ‫يب ع َْن قَ ِريب‬ َ ‫فَتُ ْخلِصُ ال َغ َرا َم لِلَّ ِذي البُ َّد أَ ْن يَ ِغ‬

Here is the English text: 73 That time of year thou mayst in me behold When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang. In me thou seest the twilight of such day As after sunset fadeth in the west, Which by and by black night doth take away, Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest. In me thou seest the glowing of such fire That on the ashes of his youth doth lie, As the death-bed whereon it must expire, Consumed with that which it was nourished by.     This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,     To love that well, which thou must leave ere long.

And here is the Arabic: ‫ص ِر ْم‬ َ ‫َام ُم ْن‬ َّ ‫ل ُربَّ َما َش ِهدْتَ ف‬ ٍ ‫ُول ع‬ ِ ‫ى فَصْ ًل ِم ْن فُص‬ ُ ‫تَصْ فَرُّ أَوْ َرا‬ ‫ُون فِيه أوْ تَقِلُّ أوْ تَ ْن َع ِد ْم‬ ِ ‫ق ال ُغص‬ ْ ‫ير ِر ْع َدةَ األَ ْفن‬ ‫َان‬ ِ ‫وقَ ْد تَ َرى فِى ال َّز ْمهَ ِر‬ ْ َ‫كَأَنَّهَا أ‬ ْ ‫ط َل ُل َمحْ فِ ِل ال ُم َرنِّ ِمينَ ْإذ خ ََل ِمنَ األَ ْل َح‬ ‫ان‬ ْ ُ‫ب ت‬ ُّ َ‫ِمن‬ ْ ‫ط ِربُ اآل َذ‬ ‫ان‬ ِ ‫س القَ ِري‬ ِ ‫ُور الصَّا ِد َحا‬ ِ ‫ت باألَ ْم‬ ِ ‫الطي‬ ‫ب كال َّشفَ ْق‬ ِ ‫وقد تَ َرى بِأَنَّنِى بَ ْع َد ال ُغرُو‬ ‫هار فى األُفُ ْق‬ َ ‫ذا‬ ِ َّ‫ك الذى يَحُلُّ فى نِهَايَ ِة الن‬ ‫وبَ ْع َدهَا َسرْ عَانَ ما يَ ُجثُّهُ اللَّ ْي ُل ال َكئِيبُ األَ ْس َو ْد‬ ‫فى ال َمرْ قَ ْد‬ َ ْ‫ت ْإذ يَ ِرينُ فَو‬ ٍ ْ‫قَ ِرينُ َمو‬ ِ ‫ق ُك ِّل َم ْن‬ ْ َّ َ ‫ار التى تَلُو ُح فى ال َحنَايَا‬ ‫ن‬ ‫ال‬ ‫ة‬ ‫و‬ ‫ذ‬ ‫ج‬ ‫وقَ ْد تُشَا ِه ُد‬ َ َ ِ ْ ‫ك الَّتِى َخلَ َل ال َّر َما ِد كَان‬ ‫صبَايَا‬ َ ‫تِ ْل‬ ِ ‫ج فى‬ ٍ ‫َت ذاتَ َو ْه‬ ْ ‫ت أَ ْم َس‬ َّ‫كأن‬ َ ْ‫ضر‬ ‫ر‬ ‫ف‬ ‫ى‬ ‫ل‬ ‫ع‬ ‫ها‬ َ َ‫ت تُحْ ت‬ َ ِ ْ‫اش ال َمو‬ ِ ِ ْ ‫وسَوْ فَ ي‬ ْ‫ُطفِيهَا الَّ ِذى َغ َذاهَا ذاتَ يَوْ ٍم بال َّش َرر‬ ْ‫ك لِ ْل َحبِيب‬ َ ‫ و ِع ْن َدهَا يَ ْق َوى هَ َوا‬.. ْ‫َنى فى ه ِذ ِه الصُّ َور‬ ِ ‫لَ ُربَّ َما َرأَ ْيت‬ َّ ْ َ َّ ْ‫يب ع َْن قَ ِريب‬ ‫غ‬ ‫ي‬ ‫أن‬ ‫د‬ ‫ب‬ ‫ل‬ ‫ى‬ ‫ذ‬ ‫ل‬ ‫ل‬ ‫م‬ ‫ا‬ ‫ر‬ ُ َ َِ ِ ِ َ َ ‫فَتُ ْخلِصُ ال َغ‬



On Translating Shakespeare’s Sonnets into Arabic

73

The other sonnet, 97, likewise much anthologized, also uses an image from nature, relying on the contrast of seasons and introducing a truly complex image about the beloved being the true father of the rich flowers and fruit in nature. The translation is fourteen lines long, with the rhyme scheme going according to the ‘rhyming couplet’ system, except for the third quatrain, which has four rhyme words. Though believing in and practising modesty throughout my career, starting with translating A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1964, I feel I may be forgiven for being pleased with my understanding (or my interpretation) of a difficult phrase, consistently passed over in all the books I have read on the sonnets and on Shakespeare – namely ‘the pleasure of the fleeting year’ in line 2. Editors never felt the need to gloss it, as the literal meaning seems quite obvious: but is it? What is the pleasure which the fleeting year has brought the poet? The phrase is not in apposition to the winter the poet felt his separation from his sweetheart was, nor does it lead to the details of that feeling in lines 3 and 4. Having minutely examined the poem, I wondered about the position of the poet vis-à-vis his beloved: the poet must be referring to his reunion with his friend when the summer is drawing to a close. The more I thought about what the poem said, the more it appeared to me that such a pleasure must be that reunion. The word ‘return’ came to me; I used it in line 2 and line 14 – the fittest coda! Here is the sonnet, followed by the Arabic version containing my interpretation of that crux, which I humbly hope is right! 97 How like a winter hath my absence been From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year? What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen? What old December’s bareness everywhere? And yet this time removed was summer’s time, The teeming autumn big with rich increase, Bearing the wanton burden of the prime, Like widowed wombs after their lords’ decease: Yet this abundant issue seemed to me But hope of orphans and unfathered fruit, For summer and his pleasures wait on thee, And thou away, the very birds are mute.     Or if they sing, ’tis with so dull a cheer     That leaves look pale, dreading the winter’s near.

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Mohamed Enani

!‫ار ْد‬ َ ُ‫َك ْم كانَ ِغيَاب‬ ِ َ‫ك َعنِّى أَ ْشبَهَ بِ ِشتَا ٍء ب‬ !‫لكنَّ ال َعا َم يَدُو ُر فَيُ ْس ِع ُدنِى بِلِقَا ِء ال َعائِ ْد‬ ْ ُ ‫ما أ ْكثَ َر ما أَحْ َسس‬ ! ْ‫ع البَرْ ِد وأَي ٍَّام ظَ ْل َماء‬ ِ ‫ْت بِلَذ‬ ! ْ‫ما كانَ أَ َش َّد َخ َوا َء ال َكوْ ِن بِدي َس ْمبِ َر فى َشتَّى األَرْ جَاء‬ ْ‫ْف ال ُم ْز ِهر‬ َّ ‫ــل ال‬ ِ ‫صي‬ ِ ْ‫لكــنَّ فِ َراقَ ِك كــانَ بِفَص‬ ْ‫صانُ بِ َح ْم ٍل ُم ْث ِمر‬ َ ‫َريفٌ ت َْثقُ ُل فِي ِه األَ ْغ‬ ِ ‫وت ََلهُ خ‬ ْ َ ْ‫بيع ال ٍه َل ِعب‬ ْ ‫ر‬ ‫ت‬ ‫ب‬ ‫ن‬ ‫ن‬ ‫م‬ ‫ين‬ ‫ن‬ ‫ج‬ َ َ ‫ِم ْن ُك ِّل‬ ِ ِ ِ ٍ ٍ ْ ‫ُر َم‬ ْ‫َار ِسهَا الغَائِب‬ ِ ‫ت ِم ْن غ‬ ِ ‫فى أَرْ َح ِام أَ َرا ِم َل ح‬ ُ ‫لكنِّــى ُك ْن‬ ْ‫ت أ َرى أنَّ تَكَـاثُ َر هــ ِذى األَ ْزهَــار‬ ْ َ‫أَ َمــ ٌل فى أ‬ ْ‫ال أَ ْيت ٍَام بَعْــ َد َوفَـا ِة ال َوالِ ِد لِألَ ْث َمار‬ ٍ َ‫طف‬ ْ‫ك ال ِم ْد َرار‬ َّ ‫فال‬ َ ‫س يَ َد ْي‬ ِ ْ‫صيْفُ و ُكلُّ َمبَا ِه ِج ِه ِم ْن غَر‬ ْ َ‫َت َحتَّى األ‬ ْ ‫فإذا ِغبْتَ ا ْنقَطَ َع الفَرْ ُح و َسـ َكت‬ ْ‫طيَار‬ ْ ‫ص َد َح‬ ْ ْ‫أو‬ ‫ار ْد‬ َ ‫تش‬ َ ‫إن‬ ِ َ‫َاب ِغنَاهَا َش َجنٌ ب‬ ْ َ‫بَلْ َش ُحب‬ ُ ‫ت أَوْ َرا‬ !‫ب ِشتَا ٍء عَائِ ْد‬ ِ ْ‫ق ال َّش َج ِر َمخَافَةَ قُر‬

One final remark I must make: how I hate the Arabic translators’ habit of turning the summer in Shakespeare into spring, as though performing an act of cultural adaptation. What the translator should do is render Shakespeare’s vision, rather than an Arab one. If they had lived in England as long as I had, they would have realized that the English summer can be as hot as it is in Egypt, when ‘sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines’. Shakespeare’s sonnet 18 should show how a distinction is made between the summer and the spring (represented by ‘May’) – even in translation, or especially in translation, the verse should live forever. Here, in conclusion, are the English text and the new Arabic rendering: 18 Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate: Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer’s lease hath all too short a date; Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, And often is his gold complexion dimmed, And every fair from fair sometime declines, By chance or nature’s changing course untrimmed: But thy eternal summer shall not fade, Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st; Nor shall Death brag thou wand’rest in his shade, When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st.     So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,     So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.



On Translating Shakespeare’s Sonnets into Arabic

75

َّ َ‫ك تُ ْشبِهُ أ‬ ‫ص ْيفًا؟‬ َ ‫أَتُ َرا‬ َ ‫ى يَوْ ٍم َم َّر بِى‬ ْ ُ‫ك أَ ْكثَ ُر ل‬ ‫طفًا‬ َ ‫ وهَ َوا‬..‫ك أَحْ لَى‬ َ ُّ‫إنّى أَظُن‬ ُ َ‫تَ ْعدُو ال ِّريَا ُح ال َعاتِي‬ ‫ات علَى بَ ِرا ِع َم ُكنَّ نَوَّا َر ال َّربِي ْع‬ َّ ‫ك فَصْ ُل ال‬ ‫ْس يَطُو ُل بال ُحس ِْن البَ ِدي ْع‬ َ ‫وك َذا‬ َ ‫ْف لَي‬ ِ ‫صي‬ ‫َولَق ْد نَ َرى َعيْنَ ال َّس َما ِء تُ ِش ُّع َح ًّرا قَد تَ َوقَّ ْد‬ َّ ‫أوْ قَ ْد يُنَقِّبُ َوجْ هَهَا‬ ‫ى َغ ْي ٌم قَ ْد تَلَبَّ ْد‬ َّ ِ‫الذهَب‬ ْ ‫ال ُحسْنَ يَ ْبقَى ِسحْ ُرهُ دَوْ ًما‬ ُ‫ولكن ُربَّ َما يَ ْفقِ ُده‬ َ ‫صا َدفَةً وإ َّما َو ْف‬ َ ‫إ َّما ُم‬ ِ ‫ق ما تَ ْق‬ ُ‫ضى الطَّبِي َعةُ َح ْسبَ َما نَ ْعهَ ُده‬ ‫ْس يَ ْذ ِوى أَبَدَا‬ َ َ‫ص ْيف‬ َ ‫ك َسرْ َم ِدىُّ لَي‬ َ َّ‫لكن‬ ‫ك ُمخَلَّدَا‬ َ ‫الَ بَلْ ولَ ْن يَ ْفقِ َد ُح ْسنًا بَاتَ فِي‬ َّ ِ‫بأن قَ ْد ب‬ ْ ‫الح َما ُم‬ ‫ت فى ِظلِّ الفَنَا ِء ُم َش َّردَا‬ ِ ‫ك ََّل ولَ ْن يَ ْزهُو‬ ‫ْرى ال ُمخَلَّ ِد قد َس َك ْنتَ ك ِم ْث ِل ه َذا ال َّد ْه ِر لن يَتَبَ َّددَا‬ ِ ‫ما ُد ْمتَ فى ِشع‬ ْ ‫ما دَا َم‬ ْ‫صـر‬ َ َ‫اس الب‬ َ ‫ت األَ ْنفَاسُ فى‬ ِ َّ‫صــ ْد ِر ال َو َرى وبِأ َ ْعي ُِن الن‬ ْ‫ْر َحتَّى تَ ْستَ ِم َّد الرُّ و َح ِم ْنها وال ُع ُمر‬ ِ ‫َستَ ِعيشُ أَ ْبيَاتِى بِه َذا ال ِّشع‬

Mohamed Enani is Professor of English at Cairo University and a distinguished scholar, playwright, critic, editor and translator. He has translated over 100 literary and critical works into Arabic and English, including twenty-four Shakespeare plays and the Sonnets (2016). He has won all three Egyptian State Awards for Literature, as well as Saudi Arabia’s World Translation Prize (2011), ALESCO’s Award for Translation (2013) and the Egyptian National Council for Translation Award (2014).

Notes 1. Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, Sūnītāt: arbaʻūn minhā maʻa al-naṣṣ al-Injilizī (Beirut: al-Muʼassasa al-ʻArabīya lil-Dirasāt wa-al-Nashr, 1983); Badr Tawfiq, Sunitāt Shakisbīr al-kāmilah: maʻa al-naṣṣ al-Injilīzī (Cairo: Muʼassasat Akhbār al-Yawm, 1988); ‘Iṣmat Wālī (Walley), Sūnitāt Shaksbīr, muraja‘at Muḥammad ‘Inānī (Enani) (Cairo: Al-Hay’a al-miṣriyya al-‘amma lil-kitāb, 2005); Kamāl Abu Dīb (Abu-Deeb), Wilyam Shakisbīr: sūnītāt, aw Tawāshīḥ (Dubai: Majallat Dubayy al-Thaqāfīyah, 2010, and Dar Sāqī, 2011); Abd al-Wahīd Lu’lu’a, Al-Ghinā’iyāt (Abu Dhabi: Kalimāt, 2013); Muḥammad ‘Inānī (Enani), Sunītāt Shaksbīr (Cairo: Al-Hay’a al-miṣriyya al-‘amma lil-kitāb, 2016). 2. Cf. Mohamed Enani, ‘Introduction’, in Angry Voices: An Anthology of the Off-Beat New Egyptian Poets (Fayette: University of Arkansas Press, 2003).

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3. Cf. my Arabic translations of Shelley and Keats, forthcoming in English Romantic Narrative Verse (Cairo: National Center for Translation). 4. One should not be surprised that the Arabs were fascinated with the camel, the ship of the desert, regarding it as a beautiful animal. 5. Cf. Katharina Reiss, ‘Text Types, Translation Types and Translation Assessment’, in Readings in Translation Theory, ed. Andrew Chesterman (Helsinki: Oy Finn Lectura Ab, 1989).

& Chapter 4

The Quest for the Sonnet The Origins of the Sonnet in Arabic Poetry Kamal Abu-Deeb

Epilogue (For the English Version of the Study) Sometime in the mid-1980s, I was working on a paper to be delivered at an international conference on the impact of Arabic literature on Western literatures. As I explored various possibilities, familiar and obscure, a phantom of an idea began to loom in my head: why is the structure of the sonnet so similar to the structure of the muwashshah in Arabic, yet the muwashshah has countless variations of structure and the sonnet has had (until recently) limited variations? And why is English poetry so relaxed about breaking rules of prosody and yet so tightly rigid about the rules that govern the structure of the sonnet, especially in Shakespeare’s time? These initial questions never had the chance to be investigated in my own work, for reasons that are not relevant to the issue. Then, in the period around 2006, I was playing around with the structure of the sonnet and found myself almost forced to write one. I did. Notes for this section begin on page 100.

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Kamal Abu-Deeb

To my surprise, however, the writing did not stop when I composed the cap, as it has been called by some, or the kharja, as the Arabs had called the last line of the muwashshah: my text went on growing until an additional stanza was completed with the rhyming scheme: HIH IIH or HI HI IH. Thus, a sonnet, written intentionally in accordance with a pre-­ established, pre-conceived model, broke through the barrier of the model and invented itself as a sonnet with a different structure. Hence, I had the Shakespearean model: AB AB CD CD EF EF GG

And my own: AB AB CD CD EF EF GG HIH IIH Or HI HI IH

What was truly significant is that I knew the model I had intended to emulate so well and that the poem refused to stop where the model became complete. An impulsive force, emanating from the very flow of the inner rhythm, the theme, imagery, vision, etc., of the poem had taken control: I had no will of my own to intervene, to stop, to obey or to disobey. At the time I had been translating a couple of Shakespeare’s sonnets because a beautiful and rather dakina friend of mine had enjoyed a translation I had made of the famous ‘Shall I compare



The Quest for the Sonnet: The Origins of the Sonnet in Arabic Poetry

79

thee to a summer’s day?’ The intervention of my own composition invoked my old phantom that the sonnet had been developed in Europe with full awareness of Arabic poetry in Spain and, specifically, of the muwashshah, and in particular the muwashshah as song. Now flashes of intriguing details began to shoot into my space: the Arabs had for centuries known a structure they called simt. And the word sonot, sonet, sinot is an Arabic word. Plus, remarkably, the Qurtuba poet Hasan ibn al-Hasan was called al-sonat. Did this sonat compose sonets? Puzzling flickers of lanterns burning in the dark. But the most significant question became this: why is Petrarch the poet ac­credited with inventing the sonnet form? He is Italian. How did Italy come into the picture if the sonnet originated in Arab Spain, and why did it take so long, first to develop in Italy then to travel across Europe and reach shake spear (or is it, as he himself signed his name, shakespere, shak esber being an Arab name)? More puzzles. It was like looking for Darwin’s missing link. And I did not even know that a missing link was missing at all. There was no evidence that a link existed. Just an intuition. Not being a specialist in Hispano-Arabic, I decided to give up because my main work as a scholar had very little to do with Hispano-­Arabic and I did not want to waste more of my life than I had already done. Just enough to translate the sonnets, I decided. The bug, however, never dies if there is something really interesting in it. The itch went on. And I began to scratch again. This time, however, not in Hispano-Arabic but elsewhere. I had for years written on and taught courtly love and its origins in Arabic poetry1 and while doing that I had done some reading about the courts in which courtly love was popular and might have originated; and one of these was not in Spain but in Sicily. Sicily! That is where the reward lay, I felt. I sat down and charted the structures of all the sonnets written in Sicily – a century or more before Petrarch – in the court of Frederick II (1194–1250), in which a poet named Lentini lived and composed poetry that was unusual and followed different rules and had schemes, or structures, that are variations, yes variations, on structures of the muwashshahat produced by Arab poets all over the place. And a major one of these poets was the Arab Ibn Hamdis al-Siqilli (c.1056–1123), a fine poet in more ways than one.

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1. As I had been writing my book with the Arab reader in mind, I had to give a general description of the scheme of the sonnet as Shakespeare composed it. In the process of giving this description, and having used letters, ABCDEFG, to describe this scheme, I went on, for mysterious reasons that I can no longer remember, to use numbers to describe it; this turned out to be truly interesting. Thus I had the following representations: AB AB

12 12

CD CD

34 34

EF EF

56 56

GG

77

Wow. But seven in Arabic culture (as well as some other cultures) is a magical number in much of human activity, from religious thought to poetry: the Qur’an depicts the heavens as seven. The most beautiful poems in Arabic before Islam were seven (though in some versions, ten). A select, and very special, number of suras (chapters?) in the Qur’an are called al-sab‘ al-mathani. The seven? A cat has seven souls. And for us all, the days of the week are seven. Etc. etc. Why seven and where does it come from? Is this magical, Sufi, mystical property of the seven the mysterious reason for inventing a whole autonomous poetic structure called the muwashshah, or the sonnet, and restricting it to fourteen lines, which are in fact two sevens? Wasn’t Shakespeare = shaik esber thought to have some strange Sufi-like ideas about the soul? Allahu and other experts A‘lam. I went on transcribing the various ways in which the muwashshah was composed in the selection made by the first Arab author to write on the muwashshah. A truly dazzling variety of structures. No way of exhausting them all except in a specialized study, which mine was not. But enough was revealed to convince me that I was on the right track. Eventually, there it was: the very scheme in a muwashshah that



The Quest for the Sonnet: The Origins of the Sonnet in Arabic Poetry

81

is identical with the structure of the sonnet. And here it is, in a very rough translation just to give the reader of English some idea of the ‘content’ of the muwashshah (the Arabic text will be given later): Rise early for the wine / and inhale the flowers Life is in decline / if not drunkenness Rarely do I forego / sipping glasses as the one with the magical eyes / helps the drinkers [those sitting round for a drink] So water me / with the daughter of the finest grapes Give it to me pure, unadulterated / you, gazelle with eyes so black and white A wine that resembles a trait / of your moonlit cheeks A gazelle that is noble & just / to people and the musk is in the incense / of the wafting breath So shelter me / from the musk of Darin [a place name].

Its rhyming scheme is: AB AB CD ED GG HI HI CD ED GG

Is there any better evidence than this that the sonnets’ cap is identical with the kharja (the last phrase) of the muwashshah? A trinity of items are of special significance: The very division of the muwashshah and the sonnet into two components or blocks. The fact that the couplet of lines of the Lentini sonnet could be read as we read Arabic lines of poetry – i.e., as consisting of two hemistichs usually written as one single line across the page with a space (caesura) in the middle.

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The dazzling suggestion that the Italian word volta (in the sonnet) means kharja (in the muwashshah). More on this point below. I propose initially that the Arabic terms qufl/aqfal and bayt/abyat hide crucial clues to the nature of the muwashshah and the possible way in which it influenced the formation of the sonnet in its earliest stages. The immediate meaning of qufl, namely ‘lock’, suggests that the qufl is that element in the muwashshah that establishes (or ‘locks up’) the scheme of rhythm and rhyme that will be maintained in all the following aqfal, which is not the case in the bayt.2 However, I think that more hidden and more significant meanings are at play in the naming of qufl and bayt. I hope to explore this issue further in the future, but I suggest for the time being that qufl (in one of the meanings of the word) refers to the constituent that involves repetition or ‘returning to’ a previous element (such as rhythm or rhyme), whereas bayt denotes the more varied constituent, like a bayt (house, tent) which contains a variety of objects and arrangements. This division appears to be the basis of dividing the sonnet (in its early as well as late form) to the octet and sestet, the first being the element with regular repetition or ‘returning to’, the second being a lot more varied. More on this in a future work, time permitting.

2. I shall now give a version in English of the analysis I carried out to produce the Arabic study. I am only presenting here one section of the Arabic; the other sections contain significant material as well, in addition to examples of the sonnet, a historical brief of its transformations, Shakespeare’s life and work and, most intriguingly, my fantasy that his name may have originated in Arabic in the form shaik esber, which was then slightly modified in writing and pronunciation into Shake spear. Possible evidence resides in the variety of ways in which his name was written in his own lifetime.



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3. Here is my Arabic original with very slight changes: I have said that the invention of the sonnet is attributed to Petrarch in non-specialized (and most specialized) circles – a more grave error indeed. Had it been true, it would have meant that this Italian poet had suddenly invented a complex structure, or even genre, without any previous model even in a budding state of being; this is no more likely than God making Adam out of nothing. And God himself didn’t do that: he created Adam out of mud and water, each in its turn coming out of something existing previously. For a short time in the past I had thought that Petrarch had known samples of the art of tawshih (and the composition of muwashshah in Arabic poetry) that he managed to emulate and produce a simple form of muwashshah that has the structure for which Petrarch has been famous and which is called the Petrarchan sonnet. And had Petrarch been an inhabitant of Spain, I would have had no hesitation to believe that my conjecture is very likely to have been what actually happened. But Petrarch was Italian and I knew nothing about his relations or the lack of them with Spain (a point that deserves further contemplation, and which might be carried out in the future). Yet, in reality, there is a hidden unknown, which is a bit of a time bomb that needs to be exploded. The reality is that Petrarch did not invent the sonnet that is famously attributed to him. What is commonly stated in less meticulous literary histories is inaccurate. There is a forerunner to Petrarch who came more than a century before him and who weaved poems which had the structure for which Petrarch became famous later. This time bomb of a poet was a citizen of Sicily and lived very close to the time when the Arabs lived in and ruled Sicily, and close in time to the Arab poet Ibn Hamdis al-Siqilli (possibly 1056 until around 1123). Indeed, the Sicilian poet lived in the very same region in which the Arab poet had lived, namely Syracuse. Ibn Hamdis was famous for the poetry he wrote in nostalgia for Sicily after departing from it. And a detailed study of his poems may reveal interesting links to it and to the circles in which he moved (something I hope to be able to carry out in the future).

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The name of the Sicilian poet I have been talking about is ­ iacomo da Lentini (or Lentino);3 he lived in the court of ­Frederick II G (1194–1250) and served for a period of time as a governor of a fortress called Carsiliato. More importantly, he was the leader of the first group of Italian poets and composed, together with other members of the group, thirty-one sonnets, twenty-five of which are attributed directly to him. There is no reason to believe at this point that anyone else before this group and Lentini had composed sonnets and it seems that he himself was the man who invented the sonnet, as a number of scholars believe. The sonnet was then transported into Italy wherein Petrarch and others learnt the new art and composed their own sonnets. More important than all these facts, however, is the fact that Lentini lived in the court of Frederick II and worked as a court scribe for him. And the court of Frederick II was the very location in which flourished the genre of poetry known as ‘courtly love’, for which the troubadour poets were famous and which is directly taken from Arabic love poetry, as many scholars believe. In fact, Frederick himself, as we are told, was one of the pioneers of love poetry and the product of a milieu in which cultures like Arabic, Greek and Latin mixed. He was also one of the leaders of the Crusades and knew the Arab East very well. It is as important to know that Lentini himself and his group composed poetry in the local spoken dialect, breaking away from the Provencal language used at the time, and that the language of Sicily was clearly influenced by Arabic. It is likely that Lentini and his group were themselves influenced in their use of the local spoken dialect by what they had known about the use of colloquial Arabic in the genre known as zajal, for which Ibn Quzman was famous, as well as by the important and distinctive role that the kharja (the last line of the muwashshah) played in its construction: the kharja was most attractive when used in the colloquial. It is illuminating in this respect that many types of poetry came into being (in Sicily, Italy, France, Catalonia and Spain) in the local languages of these regions and appeared also in Hebrew in some of these countries, which are all strikingly similar to the azjal of Ibn Quzman in their structures and their rhyming schemes. Yet most important for the thesis I am presenting here is the fact that Jacopone da Todi (1236–1306) composed poems similar to the zajal, which were called laude4 in Italy. Todi might have belonged to the Sicilian school led by Lentini.



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If it is true that Lentini borrowed the sonnet from Arabic poetry, then Shakespeare would owe a far greater debt to Arabic poetry and creativity than just the character of Othello in his great play. For Lentini’s impact was immense as the impact of the sonnet spread, and became so powerful first in Italy and France, then in England, wherein the sonnet which burgeoned with Lentini developed and was transformed to a point where it became known as the English or Shakespearean sonnet. And if many generations of European poets owe a debt to Lentini, then many more by now owe a greater debt to ‘Ubada Ibn Ma’ al-Sama’ (d. 1030) and other poets who invented the art of tawshih,5 and developed and refined it by composing dozens of variants of structures of the muwashshah, and making it one of the most exciting genres of poetry and singing for many centuries. And I would like to entertain a thought, by way of prediction for the pleasure of prediction if not for anything else: to fantasize that the word ‘sonnet’ itself is of an Arabic origin. It is not known in Latin, and is said to be a word in the Provencal language. I suggest that it is a modification of the Arabic word simt, which means the same thing as a necklace, and was used in Arabic to describe a type of poetic structure, and I have seen it used to refer to the muwashshah itself. Simt is a most ancient poetic structure in Arabic and has highly distinctive features, especially as far as the rhyming scheme and the numbers of lines in it are concerned (see Appendix).6 Furthermore, the plural of simt is sumut/somot, and is there anything that sounds more like ‘sonnet’ than this? Nor would I be shocked to learn at some point in the future that the word ‘sonnet’ is a slight corruption of the Arabic word nasat, deriving from listening as hearing; and listening was the foundation of singing for which muwashshahat were written, and without which the rhythm of the muwashshah often could not be preserved as regular. Insat is organically connected with muwashshah and corrupting nasat into ‘sonet’ is not strange, especially when we remember that the language of Sicily carries in its vocabulary a strong Arabic influence (in addition to that of Catalonian, Spanish, Latin and Greek). Nor is the degree of corruption from nasat to sonet striking when compared with the way in which the Arabic dar al-sina’ah has ended up as ‘arsenal’, al-taraf al-agharr as ‘Trafalgar’, al-Khwarizmi as ‘logarithm’ and dozens of Arabic words ending up in English and other European languages in forms that require a fortune teller to be able to discern the original Arabic in them (Averroes and Avicenna,

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etc.). So there is nothing unusual about nasat turning up as sonet or sonnet or about shaik esber turning up as shakesper, which is the way William Shakespeare’s name was written in his own lifetime. In fact, there would not be anything strange in seeing the Arabic word saot/sawt, turning up as sonet, and sawt was the very origin of poetry as song in the Arabic tradition as recorded by the great Kitab al-Aghani (The Book of Songs) by al-Isfahani, written in the tenth century and widely celebrated throughout the Empire, including Arab Spain. A sawt is a song rhyming as AAAA or AABA in its first lines. Yet, the final hint of evidence that we can use to strengthen the possibility that the sonnet originated in Arabic poetry is the significance of the word ‘sonnet’ in its purely linguistic context. It is thought to come from the Provencal ‘sonet’ or Italian ‘sonetto’ meaning the little or small song. This suggests that the sonnet from its very inception in the work of Lentini and others was conceived as singing. And the muwashshah was pure singing; singing was and is its very essence and the means by which its aim and purpose was achieved and the mode by which its rhythm, if not prosodically precise, was turned into a proper rhythmical structure. And in the performance of the muwashshah as song, the goodness or weakness of it was/is measured. Here are some of the passages written by Ibn Sana’ al-Mulk (1155–1211) in his detailed description of the muwashshah: The muwashshahat have no elements or rules of prosody except through setting to music and singing; that is the ‘arud (science of prosody) by which what is correctly weighed (metred) is known from what is broken, and what is perfectly measured from what has been exposed to deletion of phonetic elements (metrical units). Most muwashshahat are based on the composition of/for the urghun. And singing the muwashshah with another instrument is done by way of borrowing and majaz (transfer/metaphorical). [There is] one type which cannot be set to music and be carried through it except by relying on a word which has no meaning and which will be a support for the tune and a stick for the singer. And he (the composer of the poem) does what is not permitted to do and which cannot be carried by the setting to music, thus his scandal will be revealed when sung, for the singer using some instruments needs to change the tightness of the strings when he moves from the qufl (lock) to the bayt (house) of the muwashshah and when exiting from the bayt to the qufl; this is a position which needs to be remembered and taken note of.7



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The last statement reveals the great degree of connection in the muwashshah between its composition as words and its singing and the impact this has on its structure. In this process of composing and performing a song, the role of hearing and close, attentive listening is crucial. Insat thus is at the heart of the process; and if the muwashshah is nothing but song, those who would be listening to it in Spain and Sicily would have considered it merely as song. They might have understood its language, or failed to understand it, but they would be in a state of insat-nasat to its tune. Imagine a group of Arabs and non-Arabs listening and one is asking: what is this? The Arab would probably say ‘a song’ rather than a muwashshah because nobody really knew what muwashshah as a word meant; not even Ibn Sana’ al-Mulk or al-A‘ma al-Tutayli nor you nor I. This is a song, a simt, a small song, or a sonat=sonet=sonetto. And the sonnet continued to be organically connected with music and singing even in Shakespeare’s time when it got more complex and philosophically and intellectually contemplative. Shakespeare’s Sonnet Two was famous as a song and there are many sonnets nowadays, Shakespearean and otherwise, set to music.

4. The muwashshah’s structure, as Ibn Sana’ al-Mulk has described it in what is thought to be the first definition of it in Arabic, is constituted in aqfal and abyat. And the degree of complexity varies from one muwashshah to another in their structuring of the qufl and the bayt. There are two distinct types of muwashshah: the complete (which begins with a qufl) and the aqra’ (literally, bold) which begins with a bayt. The complete type consists of six aqfal and five abyat. The aqra’ consists of five abyat and five aqfal. The minimum number of parts in a qufl is two and may go up to eight, rarely would it consist of nine or ten; the minimum number of parts in the bayt is three and may be in rare cases two, and can be of three and a half parts, and up to five parts. The part of a qufl is always singular/simple, whereas the part of a bayt can be single or compound. The compound only consists of two or three phrases, or faqarat, although on rare occasions it can have four faqarat. The rhyming schemes in the muwashshah are of immense variety. One of these countless rhyming schemes is almost identical with the

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scheme we find in the first of the sonnets composed by Lentini and his group. In fact, if we write Lentini’s sonnets in the way used to write Arabic poetry generally (including the muwashshah), namely by considering each couplet to be one line with two hemistichs, it would become clear right away that the sonnet forms a simple type of muwashshah in which the qufl consists of two parts, each part consisting of three phrases, whereas the bayt consists of four parts with two phrases in each. What is remarkably significant also is that three of Lentini’s sonnets contain internal rhymes, i.e. they divide the line of poetry into what Ibn Sana’ calls tajzi’, or division into parts. This feature occurs frequently in the muwashshah both in the qufl and the bayt. The present scheme of rhyming in the Lentini sonnet as written in the West is: A B A B A B A B C D E C D E

And there may be other variations in the last six lines. If we rewrite that scheme in the Arab way, it will look like this: AB AB AB AB CD EC DE



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This scheme is no more than one of the simple schemes that the muwashshah may have in the aqfal and the abyat, where each bayt consists of four parts, each part of two phrases, followed by a qufl repeating what is present in the Lentini sonnet, as I have re­ arranged it. Should it appear that I am performing an unscholarly act by rewriting the sonnet as I did, I would refute that. To my great luck, after I had formulated my arguments, including rewriting the sonnet as I did, I found a scholar who has said the following: ‘The octet rhymes in every case ABABABAB, and was regarded rather as a series of four distiches than as a pair of quatrains’.8 That is exactly the way the bayt is composed in the muwashshah I translated above: ‘Rise early for the wine’. This leaves me in no doubt that the sonnet written by Lentini was mirroring one or other muwashshah that he had learnt from his environment, which was strongly influenced by Arabic. Indeed, this degree of mirroring becomes sharper the more we explore Lentini’s sonnets and relate them to the muwashshah. In these sonnets the rhyming scheme of the sestet (the part consisting of six lines) differs from the one I described above and can be of any of these types: CDCDCD CDCCDC ACDACD

which is a rhyming scheme that we find in the aqfal of the muwashshah, wherein we also find countless varieties which may well have formed the overall model (the paradigm) which Lentini learnt and of which he and his group borrowed one that they liked more; indeed, they may have borrowed most elements of the paradigm of the muwashshah and modified some slightly for one reason or another. And Allah knows best. I shall now present samples of muwashshahat in which we see clearly that the structure of the sonnet composed by Lentini is no more than a chipped section of the muwashshah, which forms a bayt of four parts and two qufl each in two parts, each part in more than one phrase. The Arabic text of each muwashshah is quoted, but translating it will ruin the rhyming scheme; I shall transliterate the first muwashshah so that the reader can see the rhymes clearly.

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Example 1: Ma hawa mahasina l dahri illa ghazal Mu‘riqul jaddayni min fahri ‘ammin wa khal Nisbatan li l na’ili l ghamri wa li l nizal Fa ana ahwahu li l fakhri wa li l jamal Wajhuhu wajhun taliq li l duyuf mushriq wa yadun tastu ‘ala l usdi fa tafraq

‫ ما حوى محاسن الدهر إال غزال‬AB ‫ معرق الج ّدين من فهر ع ّم وخال‬AB ‫ نسبة للنايل الغمر وللنزال‬AB ‫ فأنا أهواه للفخر وللجمال‬AB ‫ وجهه وجه طليق للضيوف مشرق ويد تسطو على األسد فتفرق‬ AB AB AB AB CDED

It can also be read as: Wajhuhu wajhun taliq li l duyuf mushriq wa yad tastu ‘ala l usd fa tafraq

CDE

FFE

This second reading produces a fourteen-line muwashshah with a striking kharja, metrically and grammatically. Example 2:

ْ ‫فضحت س ّر المدامه‬ ‫ بثنايا كاألقاحي‬ ‫ وقناع كالصباح غلبت ألف غمامه‬ ‫ فتنحّوا يالواحي واسألوا الله السالمه‬ ‫ فلها على المالح بجمالها اإلمامه‬ ‫ريقها دار االمارة ثغرها عقد‬9 ‫ فلذا تص ّد تيها حين ال ترى شبيها‬ ‫ أي حسن ما أجال ونوال ما أقال‬

AB AB AB AB CC DD EE



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AB AB AB AB CCDDEE

T his is another, and an unambiguously so, fourteen-line muwashshah, most significantly closing with EE, as the Shakespearean sonnet was to do later. Example 3: ‫بنت الكرم لها حسيس قد سمعته النفوس‬ ‫منه نفسي تسمع أمره‬ ‫بأن أمسي أشرب خمره‬ ‫أذكي حسي منها بجمره‬ ‫هذا عرسي شربت سره‬ ‫على رسمي تجلى عروس لها الثياب كؤوس‬ ABB CD CD CD CD ABB

This too consists of fourteen lines. Example 4: Another type with three abyat: ‫سلطان الحسن جم الجمال طاغي التيه‬ ‫جنات عدن في برده وما تكفيه‬ ‫يسطو ويجني وبعد هذا درُّ فيه‬ ‫مظلوم المسواك ثغر هداك باالبتسام إلى الغرام‬ ABC ADC AEC FFGG

Significantly, this closes with GG too, but consists of thirteen lines.

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Example 5: Another type with three-phrase aqfal: ‫رأيت ألف مليح وال كهذا الرشا في الد ّل والغنج‬ ‫دريتم من عنيت لم يدر إال أنا‬ ‫عنيت من قد جنيت من غصنها زهر المنى‬ ‫وطالما قد ثنيت منها قواما ليّنا‬ ‫ذاك القوام المروح سقوه حتى انتشى صرفا بال مزج‬ ABC DE DE DE ABC

Example 6: And another: ‫قامة الغصن مالها مالت فيه من غير ريح‬ ‫وكذا الشمس ما لها حالت عند وجه المليح‬ ‫فاستمع للسماء إذ قالت فيه قوالً صحيح‬: ‫نور شمسي من وجه ذا منسوخ وهي أيضا ً تقول‬ ‫إن بدري لوجه ذا البدر خادم أو رسول‬ AB AB AB CDE CFE

The last two lines here are ambiguous; they can also be read as: CDEF CDGF

and forming fourteen lines.

5. I have taken these few samples from the book by Ibn Sana’ al-Mulk, but Arab poets have produced hundreds of muwashshahat in addition to the selection he recorded. Some of these may indeed be more closely similar to the structure of the sonnet, something I hope to be able to examine in the future. But it is very significant already that in Example 4 quoted above, we already have a muwashshah that closes



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with FFGG, which is close enough to the cap of the Shakespearean sonnet. I want to emphasize that normally muwashshahat are longer than the fourteen-line sonnet, but some of them in the way normally written in Arabic are not: I have found one by Ibn Sana’ himself consisting of fifteen lines; more strikingly, Shakespeare himself composed sonnet no. 99 in fifteen lines. Yet even more significant is that – in addition to the examples I gave above – I have found amongst the muwashshahat of Ibn Sahl al-Ishbili (d. 1251), a very famous poet known as the poet and muwashshih of Ishbilia (Seville), who was a contemporary of Giacomo da Lentini, one muwashshah which consists of seven lines in the Arabic system which is in fact fourteen lines if written as a sonnet. The rhyming scheme in this muwashshah is as follows: AB CB DE DE DE AB  CB10

One even more significant truth about the sonnet and the likelihood that it originated in the Arabic muwashshah (and zajal, possibly) is the very structure of the sonnet and its division into (or composition of ) two sections both in Lentini’s version and in its Petrarchan version, a division that has remained valid in the composition and analysis of the sonnet in the languages that produced sonnets, including English, despite the many changes affecting the rhyming system. Thus, the sonnet is and was divided into two sections: the first called octet, the second called sestet. This division is no more than a mirror, or rather a copy, of the division of the muwashshah into aqfal and abyat. Finally, and as a musk of the ending, the sonnet closes rhyming-­ wise with a couplet sharing the same rhyme, GG, which – as I have indicated – has something distinctive about it, not only rhyming-wise but often with reference to meaning or attitude, making it different in this fashion from the previous twelve lines, and coming like a fatlah or qaflah (like a ‘twist’ or a ‘lock’), which is called the volta. This feature is one of the most distinctive of the muwashshah in the aqfal section, on the one hand, and on the other in the famous kharja

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(possibly meaning ‘exit point’, deriving from khuruj, or ‘ornamental point’, deriving from takhrij). The kharja has always been described as the focal point and the pillar of the muwashshah, which enjoys qualities that are peculiar to it on the purely linguistic/phonetic level as well as on the semantic level. A crucial piece of evidence seems to me to reside in the connection, conceptually, between the kharja of the muwashshah and the volta of the sonnet; if this conceptual correspondence can be found to be expressed on a linguistic level, then a missing link of a Darwinian dimension can be discovered. And here is what it will look like: the word kharja, as I said, means ‘exit’: the phrase at which the composer will have completed his poem and ‘exited’ from it; the word volta seems to have the same significance in Italian, being also the last phrase at which the composer will ‘exit’11 from his composition, having completed and capped it. If this is true, and it seems to be so, then volta would have been no more than a direct translation by the early composers of sonnets of the Arabic word kharja. Despite this thrilling ‘discovery’, however, I need to investigate further the semantics and nature of both kharja and volta at some point in the future. For the time being, it is sufficient to say that by the ‘nature’ of the volta and kharja, I mean the linguistic and artistic qualities each of them possesses as a closing element, or a closure, in their respective genres. In this respect, Ibn Sana’ al-Mulk’s description of the kharja plays a most illuminating role. Here it is in a relatively unpolished translation: The kharja is the last qufl of the muwashshah; it has to be H ­ ajjajiyya12 in triviality, Quzmaniyya in its linguistic deviation [from Fusha Arabic], hot, burning, sharp, ripening, [taken] from the speech of the masses or the special class (select group). If it is grammatically proper and woven on the model of the abyat and aqfal preceding it, the muwashshah ceases to be a muwashshah, except however if it is one in praise of some person and the name of this person is mentioned in the kharja … The kharja may be grammatically proper even without the name of the praised person but on condition that its words be highly erotic, bewitching, enchanting, magical and akin to love and yearning, which is an unachievable and highly demanding condition … What is required, indeed imperative, in the kharja is that exiting towards it [or the approach path to it] be in leaps and digression and speech borrowed and attributed to [uttered by] some tongues (other than the composer?) either of those who can speak or those who cannot, or be about topics belonging to different species. It is mostly



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made to be uttered by boys and women and drunken males and females. The bayt which precedes the kharja must contain the words ‘he said’, or ‘I said’ or ‘he sang’ or ‘I sang’ or ‘she sang’. The kharja is the mixed nuts and seeds13 of the muwashshah and its salt and sugar and musk and ambries; it is the final outcome and should be praiseworthy, and the seal [khatima] yet in fact it is the first, even though it is the last. I say the first because it is the item that must be born in the mind first. Thus, however the words and the metre come unto him [the composer] light unto the heart, elegant into the ear, naturally flowing into the Self, sweet unto the taste, he would handle it, craft it, treat it artistically, then upon it construct the muwashshah, because in it he has found the foundation and captured the tail and upon it erected the head.14

The significance of this description can be so crucial in the light of the fact that the Italian poet Jacopone da Todi (1226–1306), as I mentioned earlier, composed poems which resemble the azjal of Ibn Quzman (who is mentioned as a model for the kharja in the text quoted above), which were called laude. Examining Todi’s poetry and the properties of his language, especially this laude epithet, in the light of Ibn Sana’ al-Mulk’s description of the kharja may open new horizons for contemplation. Will Fate permit?

6. I shall now present the sonnet thought by one scholar to be the first to be composed by Lentini, in its original language first then in an English translation,15 hoping that the reader will be able to trace the rhyming scheme in it with ease. Molti amadori la lor malatia portano in core, che ‘n vista non pare; ed io non posso sì celar la mia ch’ ella non paia per lo mio penare: però che son sotto altrui segnoria, né di meve nonn-ò neiente a·ffare, se non quanto madonna mia voria, ch’ ella mi pote morte e vita dare. Su’ è lo core e suo sono tutto quanto, e chi non à consiglio da suo core, non vive infra la gente como deve. Cad io non sono mio né più né tanto, se non quanto madonna è de mi fore, ed un poco di spirito è ‘n meve.16

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In English: Many a lover beareth his distress Within his heart, away from others’ sight, Yet can I not conceal my bitterness So that my look shall not reveal my plight. Another holdeth me in her duress, And over mine own self I have no might Save as my lady deigns to acquiesce, Who giveth life and death as of her right. Hers is my heart, hers am I all in all; And he that hath no counsel of his heart, Liveth in gentle company but ill. Nor am I verily in life at all Save through my lady, from myself apart, And the mere breath that bideth in me still.

The rhyming scheme here is clearly ABABABAB CDECDE. One does not need to gaze long to realize that this structure is almost identical with the structures of muwashshahat I have described above.

7. To close with a more aromatic misk khitam, I would like to formulate my hypothesis in the following way: The sonnet that was ‘invented’ by the Sicilian Giacomo da ­Lentini, is no more than a ‘chip’ or a ‘block’ severed from the structure of the type of muwashshah called aqra‘ (‘bold’) by Ibn Sana’, which begins with a bayt (rather than a qufl) consisting of four parts, each of two phrases, followed by a qufl consisting of two parts, each of three phrases. In such a way, the bayt will be one in metre but not in rhyming with the other abyat of the muwashshah whereas the qufl will be normally different in rhymes from the other aqfal. In this way, a varying system of rhyming appears in the section of six lines in the muwashshah, i.e. in the qufl and in the sestet of the sonnet. And because the variations in the qufl are many as far as rhyming is concerned, it is the case that the variations in the sestet of the sonnet are many. Here is a description of what I am saying:



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Octet: AB AB AB AB Sestet: CDE, as well as any of the following mathematical possibilities: CDE CED DCE DEC ECD EDC CDC DEE EFD FDE EGC

What is most exciting is the fact that when I wrote the Arabic text of this study back in 2007, I had only identified one muwashshah which closes with FFGG, but having since read and re-read many muwashshahat, I have found many in which the qufl actually closes with the rhyming couplet GG. This is a hugely significant type17 although it is rare and is called by Ibn Sana’ shadh jiddan (‘very rare, unusual’, ‘irregular’ or ‘out of the way’) because its bayt consists of two compound parts, each consisting of two phrases. The cap of this type of muwashshah is the cap that appeared as a fundamental and distinctive feature in the development of the structure of the English or Shakespearean sonnet centuries later.

8. Now the idea of severance (or partitioning or detaching) may appear odd but it is important for my present thesis: the muwashshah is a larger structure than the sonnet and this may be the secret behind calling the latter a sonnet – a small song (sonet; sonetto) – when it was ‘discovered’, rather than calling it simply a song or a large song. Indeed, it is a small song in relation to the muwashshah, because it is

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no more than a part chopped out of its five possible parts. This may well be a decisive piece of evidence in supporting my argument. Yet only God and Giacomo da Lentini know the truth of what happened in history, while I remain steeped in my ignorance.

Prologue The thesis I have presented here may strike some as being far-fetched and the idea that Lentini or anyone else in his time could have seen or heard the Arabic muwashshahat and azjal written and sung, then out of one or more examples borrowed the basic structure and maintained the basic rhythmic and rhyming scheme, but introduced variations here and there, especially in the sestet, may appear to some to be even more far-fetched. For me personally, neither of these ideas has the slightest degree of strangeness or unfamiliarity if we look at the history of literatures throughout the world. Stranger things happened when the Arabs translated Greek science, philosophy and literary texts, such as Aristotle’s Rhetorics and P ­ oetics. Closer to home, Petrarch himself borrowed Lentini’s structure of the sonnets and introduced his own variations. In ­England, the sonnet inherited from Petrarch underwent radical transformations (which included Edmund Spencer’s version, that goes ­ABABBCBCCDCDEE, which is more strikingly like a real Arabic muwashshah) then settled down into its Shakespearean format. Yet, the story did not end there: despite Shakespeare’s dominant position in English literature, right after him and up to our own days, new variations and various ways of structuring the sonnet have taken place. Some of these have been mentioned in the Arabic version of my book, but the English reader will probably not need to be fed this piece of information. If my own personal experience could be of any interest, it is indicative of the ease with which a poem, being written in full awareness of a model, and consciously trying to emulate that model, can overflow the model spontaneously, and end up making significant changes to the structure of the model it had aspired to emulate. (In my case, producing the structure ­ABABCDCDEFEFGGHIHIIH.) Examples of such an act can be easily multiplied and shown to occur not only in the genre of the sonnet but also in all aspects of creative activity and artistic production. Edward Said’s brilliant article on the migration of theory demonstrates this so eloquently and convincingly.18



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Appendix The reader of Arabic will see the significance of these examples of the musammat structure and its definitions immediately, I hope. For the reader who cannot read Arabic, translating these examples will not be very useful, but seeing their scheme of rhyming will carry considerable significance. Even the word musammat itself carries such significance, as it is the past participle of sammata (to make a simt), thus suggesting that the later structure was called muwashshah with full knowledge of musammat and taking the musammat and the art of tasmit as a model to produce muwashshah and tawshih. The actual difference between simt and wishah (‘shawl, sash thrown over the shoulder and chest’) clearly underlies and underpins the coinage of tawshih and traces the process of development from tasmit to t­awshih. The physical appearance of simt is similar in fact to a necklace, whereas the physical appearance of wishah may have inspired the layered or striped structure of the muwashshah into aqfal and abyat, each with their own ‘colours’ of rhythm and rhyme. Who knows? The musammats of ‘Umru’ al-Qays: 1) AA BB BB A 2) AA AA B 3) simpler examples with this scheme: AA AB Kamal Abu-Deeb Oxford 23 May 2016

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Kamal Abu-Deeb is Emeritus Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature at SOAS, University of London. He has taught at Oxford, Pennsylvania, Berkeley, Columbia and Dartmouth as well as at Arab universities. His recent publications include a philosophical/political text on freedom, The Book of Freedom (in Arabic, 2012), and a complete translation into Arabic of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (2011). In 2016 he received the Sultan Bin Ali Al Owais Cultural Award. He lives and works in Oxford.

Notes William Shakespeare, Al-Sūnītāt al-Kāmila bi-l-‘Arabiyya wa-l-inklīzzīyya [The Complete Sonnets in Arabic and English], trans. Kamāl Abū-Dīb (London: Dār al-Sāqī, 2011). 1. See on this topic Sigrid Hunke, Allahs Sonne uber dem Abendland: unser arabisches Erbe (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Bucherei, 1965), translated into Arabic as Shams al-‘Arab Tasta’ ‘Ala al-Gharb by Faruq Baydun and Kamal Dasuqi, 8th edn (Beirut: Dar al-Jil & Dar al-Afaq al-Jadida, 1993). 2. In other words, qufl suggests locking the poem into a rhythmic or rhyming scheme to be followed by other sections in the poem occupying a corresponding position to the first qufl. 3. In fact, this text originally referred to the poet as da Lentino; Abu-Deeb has, however, given editor Katherine Hennessey permission to substitute ‘da Lentini’, the form most commonly found in Italian language texts. 4. See references to these aspects in Henk Heijkoop and Otto Zwartjes, Muwashshah, Zajal, Kharja: Bibliography of Strophic Poetry and Music from al-Andalus and Their Influence in East and West (Leiden: Brill, 2004), ix–xvi. 5. The birth of the muwashshah remains obscure; some date it to the ninth century. See on this Jawdat al-Rikabi’s introduction to his edition of Ibn Sana’ al-Mulk’s Dar al-Tiraz fi ‘Amal al-Muwashshahat, 2nd edn (Damascus: Dar al-Fikr, 1977), 12. 6. The Appendix gives a number of examples of musammat poems composed by Arab poets, including even the great pre-Islamic ‘Umru’ al-Qays. 7. The three passages can be found in Ibn Sana’ al-Mulk, Dar al-Tiraz, ed. al-Rikabi, 47–50. 8. Ernest Wilkins, ‘The Earliest Sonnet’, in Studies in Petrarch and Boccaccio, ed. Aldo S. Bernardo (Padova: Antenore, 1973), 22. 9. A word is missing here but it ends with the sound sequence ‘arah as the rest of the muwashshah shows, i.e., CC. 10. See Yusri ‘Abd Alla, ed., Diwan Ibn Sahl al-Ishbili (Beirut: Dar al-Kutub al-­‘Ilmiyya, 1988), 37. 11. I owe the revelation of the meaning of volta to my friend and colleague Tullio Lobetti with whom I have discussed a number of points on the sonnet related to Italian literature; his valuable ideas have helped me formulate a couple of points while preparing this English version of my study. One of his most crucial items of information is that when Italian students are taught the sonnet at school, they



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are taught that it consists of a number of elements that end with an ‘exit’. How exciting! However, even in its sense as ‘turn’, volta appears to me to be a reflection of the kharja. 12. Ibn al-Hajjaj is one of the most formidable poets of the ‘Abbasid age in Baghdad, but his vulgar language, shocking vocabulary of homosexuality and such items gave him a bad name. His Diwan is totally un-publishable even today, with all the libertarianism of the postmodern, postmoral, postALL world. 13. Nuts and seeds (abzar) of various plants such as melon and pumpkin are roasted and served with wine; without them, drinking is not much of a pleasure to the connoisseur. However, abzar also means ‘spices’. 14. See the full description in Ibn Sana’ al-Mulk, Dar al-Tiraz, ed. al-Rikabi, 40–44. 15. Both taken from Wilkins, ‘The Earliest Sonnet’, 22. 16. Katherine Hennessey has, with Kamal Abu-Deeb’s approval, edited the Italian text of this sonnet, following the text provided in I poeti della scuola siciliana, vol. I°: Giacomo da Lentini, ed. Roberto Antonelli (Rome: Bulzoni, 1979, since reprinted by Mondadori/Giulio Einaudi, 2008 and 2009). 17. Another very important type is evident in muwashshah no. 32 in Dar al-Tiraz, which can be described as follows: AA BBB AA CCC AA DDD AA The degree of variation in this type is significant and its closure with AA is particularly interesting. 18. In ‘Travelling Theory’, Said demonstrates that theories which are formulated in one culture and adopted or used by an individual in another culture undergo considerable transformations and acquire qualities which are determined by various conditions that prevail in the receiving culture. He traces some of the most influential theories in the humanities in their travels to illuminate his argument. See The World, the Text, and the Critic (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1983).

& Chapter 5

Egypt between Two Shakespeare Quadricentennials 1964–2016 Reflective Remarks in Three Snapshots Hazem Azmy

Translating a text and releasing it into a new culture is somewhat similar to the introduction of a radioactive isotope into someone’s body. When tracing the success of and the resistance to an author’s work in a theatrical culture different from the one in which it was initially staged, many dynamics in the new environment are exposed, and so become essential to the discussion.1

Snapshot One: al-Masraḥ Magazine In January 1964, the first issue of al-Masraḥ (Theatre) hit the newsstands in Egypt amid a climate of huge euphoria. The new monthly magazine was at once a product and an agent of a richly complex moment, one in which the Egyptian state under President Gamal

Notes for this section begin on page 118.



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Abdel Nasser appeared to embark on an all-out ‘cultural ­renaissance’. As I wrote elsewhere summing up the mood of this moment: Historians and cultural producers of all types (but with theatre artists at the forefront) were immediately set to work. Past socio-political orders were vilified – or erased altogether – as either foreign or unpatriotic or both. Whatever the elitism and social injustice ascribed to such orders, they were now replaced with an ‘alliance of all the working powers of the people’, to recall one of the most oft-repeated official slogans of the times. Also, the junta of ‘Free Officers’ that toppled the Mohamed Ali dynasty predominantly hailed from peasant or middle-class backgrounds, a detail that helped promote a narrative of the new ruling class as quintessential Egyptians governing ‘themselves’ for the first time in centuries. Since they were still in their thirties, this also gave way to a companion narrative in which the young generation was now at the helm, shaping its own ‘revolutionary’ Egypt: for all intents and purposes, Egypt was now re-imagined as a forward-looking socialist utopia with an anti-colonial message to impart not only to its citizens but also to other Arab countries, as the latter presumably sought the guidance of the Egyptian ‘elder sister’.2

Many of the period’s most promising directors were sent on scholar­ ships abroad, returning with new ideas that served to invigorate the scene. Indeed, [w]orking in theatres funded and run by what seemed like a supportive state, these directors introduced modernist and predominantly avant-garde stage practices that helped shape the interpretations of the period’s major dramatists. The latter, in turn, were either Egyptian or world-recognized foreign playwrights, their work rendered into Arabic by a new wave of dedicated dramatic translators.3

Nu‘man Ashour, one of the period’s leading playwrights, wrote more than two decades later that theatre was foregrounded as the ‘chief pulpit’ of Nasser’s regime,4 hence the still-pervasive narrative of the 1960s as the lost halcyon days of Egyptian theatre. Shakespeare, as is the case in many decolonizing countries, was in the foreground too. The April 1964 issue of al-Masraḥ, only the magazine’s fourth, was a special issue in honour of the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth. In addition to articles and studies by the leading Egyptian experts on the Bard and English drama, the issue included a translation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Mohamed Enani, then one of the younger founding staff of al-­ Masraḥ (now a renowned critic and translator, and a contributor to this volume).

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However one evaluates this ‘renaissance’ today, the magazine’s founding years still cry out to be revisited with the appropriate critical historical lens (i.e., deconstructively, and beyond the almost compulsory nostalgia). In his autobiography Wāḥāt al-‘umr (The Oases of Life), Enani offers an intriguing inside account of the period and its underlying zeitgeist. The magazine owed much of the cultural capital it instantly amassed upon its first release to the formative editorship of Rashad Rushdi (1915–1983), Enani’s mentor and professor in the English Department of Cairo University. A playwright and an influential literary critic in his own right, Rushdi is still fondly remembered as one of the most emblematic intellectual figures of the 1960s, but also as one of the closest to the ear of the political establishment. An impeccable aesthete both in taste and demeanour, and while still making the requisite nod to the socialist ideals of the Nasserist state, Rushdi remained throughout his career a staunch advocate of a safely formalist, politically sanitized version of the New Critical tenets. One need look no further than his editorial for that April 1964 special issue. Here, Rushdi proposes that one of the Bard’s chief contributions was inspiring T.S. Eliot with the idea of the Objective Correlative, which allowed Eliot to crack open the notoriously problematic Hamlet, only to become an indispensable critical tool ever after. Whether by chance or design, this decidedly New Critical orientation must have allowed Rushdi and like-minded contemporaries to comment from a safe ‘aesthetic’ distance on the breathtakingly heady developments of their times, both at home and abroad. For an astute reader leafing through the yellowed issues, a lot of the tensions of the period are readily detectable between the lines. To be sure, the period was one that sought to propagate a single narrative or a particular set of dominant narratives (about the Nasserist PanArab social Utopia and all that), yet these writers were also seeking to think beyond these received narratives, even when it would seem that they were generally in agreement with them. The magazine described itself as the magazine for theatre culture (Majallat al-thaqāfa al-masraḥīyya), catering for a readership in Egypt and the Arab world that consisted of both academics and informed general readers. With few exceptions, most of the established contributors to the old magazine were trained in literature, not theatre. Still, their understanding of the theatrical process and its specific nature would put some of today’s theatre critics to shame. Their command



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of both Arabic and English (or whatever other European languages at hand) allowed them to express the most complex of ideas in as clear and lucid a style as possible, without resorting to any unnecessarily cumbersome jargon or mere theoretical posturing. Even more, inasmuch as al-Masrah’s (predominantly Western-trained) writers were part of the intellectual corps of their decolonizing times, and thereby naturally wary of various forms of hegemony, one gets the impression that they were at pains to figure out ways to admire the hegemonic Western culture without necessarily becoming slavish to it. Although rarely treated as a mere ‘English’ writer (i.e., ‘one of them’), Shakespeare was no exception to this treatment. The April 1964 special issue on Shakespeare is a good case in point. The magazine, it must be mentioned, was issued by Al-Hakim Theatre, named after Tawfiq al-Hakim (1898–1987) during his lifetime, as part of the official canonization of the playwright as the most representative of the era’s founding ideals. Nasser, no less, claimed al-Hakim – especially his novel ‘Awdat al-Rūḥ (The Return of the Spirit) – as one of his formative intellectual influences. We know better today than to idealize this bond between the intellectual and younger fan-turned-president. Shortly after Nasser’s death, Hakim would produce his 1971 tract ‘Awdat al-Wa‘i (The Return of Consciousness), a bitter repudiation of Nasser’s one-man state. Not surprisingly, the Shakespeare special issue features an interview with al-Hakim. Originally a Francophile and thereby heavily inspired by Greek drama via its French reconfigurations, al-Hakim goes as far as to claim that Sophocles was a better dramatic poet than Shakespeare (whom he regards as a more ‘novelistic’ poet) because the former’s craftsmanship showed a tighter dramatic structure and clearer focus without incessant jumping from one place or time to another. This from the playwright who often claimed – falsely, many today agree – that his own heavily philosophical plays were more suitable for reading than actual theatrical staging. In terms of ideas, however, al-Hakim seemed to have closer affinity with Shaw. In his interview we hear echoes of the Shavian attitude towards the Bard: a fond ‘irreverence’, if that is the word, that aims not to undermine Shakespeare’s genius but to strip him of the deceptive trappings of Bardolatory and to reappraise him as one of the greatest writers of all time who is not without his own, naturally human shortcomings. For what it’s worth, we get a taste of this attitude in Ikhlas Azmy’s excellent translation of Shaw’s 1910

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Illustration 5.1. Rashad Rushdi.

Illustration 5.2. The state and its intellectuals: Nasser decorating Tawfiq al-Hakim with the Order of the Republic in a picture dated 17 December 1958.



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short satirical play The Dark Lady of the Sonnets, also featured in the same issue, in which Shaw depicts Shakespeare within much the same irreverent, demythologizing vein.

Snapshot Two: Lear in the Storm of Generational Conflict In 1985, Mohamed Enani, by then one of Egypt’s most respected literary critics as well as a published dramatist anxious for the integrity of his messages on stage, wrote wearily about a lingering 1960s habit of obsessive political decoding, a ‘malaise … from which very few people have recovered’: The average theatre-goer, especially among the intelligentsia, often looks for the relevance of the play’s incidents and characters to current events and public figures, and is often disappointed if he cannot find such ‘projections’ or oblique references. In fact, if serious, a play is expected to touch upon national issues, possibly the problem of government (with the Head of State thrown in for good measure).5

Enani’s dismay notwithstanding, he rightly pinpoints the centrality of politics to any attempt to understand Egyptian theatre. Enmeshed with the project of defining the modern Egyptian nation ever since its onset in the nineteenth century, modern Egyptian ­theatre continues to this day to be an exemplary vehicle for expressing a certain political imaginary, particularly as relates to power and its various asymmetries. In 2016 Egypt, we may then ask, and with the nation still struggling to move beyond four deeply problematic changes of heads of state and the political, social and economic roller coaster they have produced, is it possible, let alone desirable, to revive Shakespeare without recruiting him to touch upon the most pressing realities of the day? The answer is yes and no. It depends where one stands on the question of power. It has been suggested that the paradigmatic script of post-1952 Egyptian politics is Hamlet,6 but the continuing force of the filial impiety trope suggests we might equally plausibly read the events that led to the 25 January revolution and its subsequent complications through the lens of King Lear. For an illustration of this statement one needs to go no futher than the example of the National Theatre’s blockbuster 2002 production of the play, which was directed by veteran director Ahmed Abdel Halim (1934–2013). Abdel Halim was no newcomer to Shakespeare. His 1966 graduation project at the London Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts had

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featured him playing a memorable Othello (according to Enani, who reviewed the production for al-Masraḥ in 1965).7 Even more, cast in the Lear production were some of Egypt’s finest actors, but perhaps most remarkable among them was the popular soap opera and film star Yehia El-Fakharany in the title role. So in today’s post-revolutionary context would Lear be a play about an old man who clings too obstinately to power, or about ingrate children? It depends on whom one asks. Indeed, even in its 2002 premiere, Abdel Halim’s Lear must have felt to some like a missed opportunity to touch upon the aging President Hosni Mubarak and his perceived vanity in seeking to hand over the country, along with its people, to a handpicked heir (in this case, Mubarak’s neoliberal-­m inded younger son, Gamal, whom the elder Mubarak was reportedly grooming to inherit the presidency). Instead of engaging with such realities (or any other lived realities for that matter), the production appeared to place its emphasis on the one aspect that Nehad Selaiha identified in her review of the production: The show has that kind of ambience – the atmosphere of a festive make-believe charade. To bring Lear nearer home and achieve ‘social relevance’, the director wisely used Fatma Musa’s lucid and infinitely accessible translation, harped, somewhat simplistically, on the theme of the ingratitude of children towards their parents (cashing in on the current wave of public dismay triggered by news stories of sons butchering their mothers or chucking their old, feeble fathers out onto the streets), unearthed the fool, whom Shakespeare had safely disposed of in the third act, to recite short poems by Ahmad Fouad Nigm, and roped in Rageh Dawoud with some mellifluous tunes for accompaniment. For liveliness, Abdel-Halim used dancers to represent the storm and battle scenes, impressive sword-duels, back projections of thick clouds racing across a stormy sky, dripping rain which looked like thick clots of white blood, and painted plastic backdrops which seemed to shudder all the time.8

During the eighteen-day run-up to Mubarak’s ouster, another remarkable invocation of Lear came from a rather unlikely quarter. At the time, Mubarak’s last appointed prime minister, Ahmed Shafik, told BBC Arabic he did not see the mobilization of the predominantly young masses as ‘revolution’ (thawra), describing it instead, in a manipulative play on words, as fawra (outburst). Further, giving the patriarchal state’s typical response to the demand to abolish the gerontocracy that has warped contemporary Egypt, Shafik suggested



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the impressionable protesters should be grateful that their youthful ‘outburst’ had been heard by their well-meaning elders.9 Shafik then denounced as ‘out of bounds’ the Tahrir Square protesters’ chief demand, Mubarak’s immediate resignation. Citing what he called Mubarak’s long and glorious record of service, Shafik said that the president was under no obligation to leave office before the end of his term in September. For him, the young rebels’ demand ran against the essential nature of the Egyptian people, ‘who treat their leaders and officials with all respect and love, as fathers’. Calling on the Western world to understand and respect this fundamental Egyptian value and stop pressuring Mubarak to leave in such an unbecoming manner, Shafik recast the situation as a Lear-esque narrative: ‘If you and your father happen to fall out with each other, would this justify letting someone from the outside come to your place and kick your own father out of the house?’ Shortly after Mubarak was ousted in 2011, the National Theatre, in an effort to re-attract audiences alienated by the climate of political and cultural unrest, announced that it would revive its successful 2002 production of Lear. As it happened, the projected revival was

Illustration 5.3. The quest for a father: Ahmed Shafik during the BBC Arabic interview. Note the concurrent newsflash carrying Mubarak’s now infamous declaration that he would have resigned immediately had he not feared that chaos would ensue if he left.

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never realized, but this did not stop Lear from remaining a powerful presence in the Egyptian cultural imaginary, judging by the praise that the 2002 play continues to garner to this day as one of the most remarkable grand productions in recent memory, not to mention the fact that Al-Fakhrany was re-cast again as Lear in a 2014 successful TV adaptation of the play set in an Upper Egyptian context.10 Since then, the Lear-esque filial piety narrative has only continued to gain traction. Mubarak, so the reasoning of his loyalists goes, should be spared the humiliation of trial and imprisonment in his twilight years. Most vocal among those claiming that Egyptians are culturally required to respect their parents and elders is screenwriter and commentator Lamis Gaber, the wife of none other than Yehia El-Fakharany.

Snapshot Three: Reading The Taming of the Shrew in Cairo? In 2016 Egypt, a university course in Shakespeare affords many opportunities to engage with present-day realities. The ideology of filial piety, as pitted against the struggle to achieve a voice of one’s own in the face of an obstinate and power-obsessed patriarchal institution, remains only one among the many aspects of the cultural baggage that a teacher needs to tap. This I continue to learn firsthand whenever I set out to teach The Taming of the Shrew to my undergraduate students at Ain Shams University’s Department of Drama and Theatre Criticism. In a May 2010 review of an English-language student production of Taming at the American University in Cairo, Nehad Selaiha reflects pithily on the play’s career (or relative lack thereof ) on the Egyptian stage and in university curricula: For most Arab men, and I dare say many Arab women, The Taming of the Shrew would seem a perfectly unproblematic play, completely in harmony with the inherited values and traditional perceptions of males and females. Unlike in the West, where the play’s apparent misogyny has been the subject of heated controversy for at least a century, this aspect, if at all noticed in Egypt, would hardly raise an eyebrow or stir up any thoughts. Could this explain why The Shrew spawned so many stage productions and screen, opera, radio, television and musical theatre adaptations in the West while in Egypt it rarely appears on the curriculum of English departments at Egyptian universities?11



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Having begun to teach this play since the autumn term of 2014, as part of a team-taught course on Medieval and Renaissance Western Theatre, I wanted to test and update Selaiha’s remarks, given my new ‘post-revolutionary’ context. The overwhelming majority of students in my department are young women; most are Muslim from more traditional middle class backgrounds; most don a hijab of some sort. Born in the late 1990s, they are the hapless products of Mubarak’s dysfunctional school system whose entry into university roughly coincided with the heady years that followed the revolution against him, precisely when Egypt was becoming ever more mired in a deeply conflictual state of political and cultural soul-searching. In the first class session on Taming, I announce that I will play them a rare recording of a song from Shakespeare’s time. Instead of an Elizabethan ballad, I play them a YouTube video of the title song of Donia Samir Ghanem’s 2013 album Wahda Tania Khales (A Totally Different Person). Here, a besotted young woman of our times sings about how much she has been transformed by her boyfriend, so much that she lets him choose her friends and the music to which she should listen. The refrain sounds like a woman-tamer’s dream come true: I dress in whatever way he pleases I never say no to anything he wants I see everything the way he sees it To the letter I just follow his every command12

Not unexpectedly, these lyrics drew the ire of many women’s rights activists and liberal commentators. This did not stop the song from becoming an instant hit on YouTube, reportedly earning half a million clicks only twenty-four hours after it was uploaded in September 2013. Indeed, the daily al-Watan reported that some of the young women polled said they approved of the song (as do some of my students).13 For them, the song is simply an expression of a reality by whose rules they must abide, whether they like it or not: a young woman needs to project the best traditionally pliant image of herself in the hope of attracting her love interest and getting him to ‘be more serious’ about the relationship (read: tie the knot). ‘Is the female singer here a modern Kate making a musical version of her infamous submission speech, or a modern Bianca playing the nice girl before her marriage emboldens her to reveal her truer, more

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defiant nature?’, I ask my students by way of alerting them to the theatricality of both situations. The Taming of the Shrew is, after all, a play that boasts four layers of theatricality: it is a play within a play within a play within a play. First we have the actual play put on in a theatre, and then we have the ‘play’ that the Lord puts on to carry out a practical joke at the expense of Christopher Sly, then the one played by the strolling actors before Christopher Sly (who is now unwittingly playing the Lord), and finally, perhaps, we have the many playacts put on by the characters in their dealings with one another, the relationship between Kate and Petruchio being exemplary of these. When I first listened to Ghanem’s song I thought it was a mere spoof; it soon became clear that it was not. Still, the possibility of a satirical streak in Taming cannot be ruled out with equal confidence. To the students most disturbed by the song’s unabashed male chauvinism, I often respond by reminding them that although the singer is a woman, the writer of the lyrics is a certain Amir Te’aima, a man. Much as with Shakespeare’s controversial comedy, it is possible to read the lyrics as the wishful thinking of one contemporary man about the extent of his masculine superiority, established even to the point of pushing the woman to express pleasure at her ultimate subjugation. (‘Strangely enough, I feel so happy about what’s going on’, the speaker in the song shyly admits.) Most of the popular Arabic stage and screen adaptations accessible to my students are often in no mood to challenge the received male supremacist interpretation of the text. As Selaiha points out in her review, perhaps the most popular among these adaptations is director Fatin Abdel-Wahab’s 1962 film Ah Min Ḥawa’ (Beware of Eve!) which casts the ultimate screen macho of the time, Rushdy Abaza, as Hassan, the Petruchio-like tamer.14 For the part of the unruly heroine, here named Amira (ironically, colloquial Egyptian Arabic for the good-natured woman), Abdel-Wahab cast Lubna Abdelaziz, an actress who was then fresh in the public imaginary as the star of director Salah Abu Seif’s 1959 Ana Horra (I Am Free!). As its title implies, the 1959 film is a powerful screen depiction of a young woman who seeks her freedom from the shackles of traditional Egyptian morality – only to find her true, higher freedom in becoming the doting partner of an activist journalist who devotes his life to battling the many perceived injustices of late-monarchic Egypt. Tellingly, Ana Horra ends on a hopeful note when the two officially



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get married although still in prison for their political activism. The 1952 revolution is on the horizon, ushering in a more equitable society where women are routinely hailed as ‘the other half of society’. By contrast, the 1962 film adaptation of Taming stays in line with the traditional battle-of-the-sexes and male chauvinist interpretation. It ends with the two leads locked in a passionate kiss, the woman having finally realized the error of her ways. There is much in the film that supports this romantic ending, if only because Abaza as Hassan, the Egyptian Petruchio, remains civil towards his ill-­ mannered Kate. This seems to be in line with the spirit of the revolutionary times where the Egyptian state boasted of championing

Illustration 5.4. ‘The other half of society’: women army volunteers during the 1956 Suez War.

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Illustration 5.5. A traditional battle-of-the-sexes interpretation: Lubna Abdelaziz and Rushdy Abaza in the 1962 film Ah Min Hawa’.

the cause of women’s rights in the public sphere. As Hala Shukrallah explains, however, this relative breathing space accorded to women was far from a true empowerment, in that it related to a division between the religious and the secular in the public sphere that had long existed before the 1952 revolution, only to continue to hold sway for many decades afterwards: Laws which regulated marriages, divorce, polygamy and child custody continued to be governed by religious laws, which had upheld male rights for centuries. The dominance of secular institutions in the public sphere led to a compromise with the religious institutions in the private sphere, a sphere which most concerned women’s intimate lives, and which represented the last stronghold of the religious powers and the first to be attacked during the era of Islamic revivalism in the seventies. … In this process, national identity was forged within the framework of a secularist discourse allied with modernization. The Islamic trend, forced outside the modernist reformist framework which was dominated by secular discourse, developed a more populist appeal.15

Perhaps within the same vein of appearing modern, Shakespeare’s original text (however misogynistic otherwise) shows a preference



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for a less violent approach to a woman’s taming. As Ann Barton once argued, ‘[b]y comparison with the husband who binds his erring spouse, beats her, bleeds her into a state of debility or incarcerates her inside the salted skin of a dead horse … Petruchio – although no Romeo – is almost a model of intelligence and humanity’.16 As many scholars of the period now believe, these old sadistic methods of disciplining a shrewish wife were already coming under attack during Shakespeare’s time, giving way to more benevolent methods of ‘killing a woman with kindness’ until she has fully been tamed into accepting her subservient status to her husband. In his 1598 tract A Godlie Forme of household Government, carefully to bee practiced of all Christian householders, Robert Cleaver compares the process to taming a wild horse, a popular analogy at the time.17 Playing on the same idea of domesticating an animal, the 1962 Egyptian film adaptation makes similar analogies when the Egyptian Petruchio, a veterinarian by profession, compares taming Amira, his Kate, to handling a wild ass. This more subtle method is not immediately apparent in Richard Burton’s Petruchio in Franco Zeffirelli’s film adaptation The Taming of the Shrew (1967). Here, Burton is not above engaging in physical violence, albeit sometimes in a slapstick manner, with and against his Kate, played by none other than Elizabeth Taylor, then his real-life partner in a marriage that, like that of Kate and Petruchio, had long captivated the public’s attention with its tempestuous theatricality. I show the Zeffirelli film to my students, without subtitles; thanks in part to the music and the picturesque Renaissance setting, they almost invariably seem to love the film and enjoy the intense physicality incorporated therein even though it is not called for by the text. This often raises the question of domestic violence in the film, the text and the outer world. Students react with surprise and horror when we start to explore the acts of violence perpetrated in early modern England against shrewish wives in the name of disciplining them, and contemporary religious apologies for the use of such disciplinary violence. Yet domestic violence remains among the most pressing challenges in contemporary Egypt. As one example, I play them a recent video of a Salafist Muslim cleric defending the practice of beating one’s wife on religious grounds, which might have passed for a sermon to this effect from Shakespeare’s time.18 After playing my students the video, I ask them about the extent to which the cleric’s words are, in their view, representative of the

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dominant thinking in their contemporary realities. The question takes them aback, but it never fails to get some discussion going. Most agree that what the cleric says does reflect the thinking of only one faction of the society, which, however vociferous and increasingly militant about its visibility, cannot be made to stand for the whole complex picture. I agree, and ask them to apply the same scepticism to the play at hand. So much for any absolute certainty with which we can speak about ‘the Elizabethan World Picture’ (pace Tillyard) – or any other homogenous World Picture for that matter. Indeed, as Marvin Carlson and I have argued elsewhere, even in its originating culture, images of any lived realities are always fraught with problems, contradictions, and tensions between various competing forces. As such, one should exercise utmost critical scrutiny regarding deceptively uniform images of any lived reality, particularly when such images seek to become shorthand for a number of complex and hotly contested ‘foreignized’ realities such as those of the Arabo-Islamic world.19

In using the above tactics in my Shakespeare class, I am not interested in simply engaging my students in their assigned late sixteenth-­century play (or, more precisely, a 1960 translation of the text into erudite Modern Standard Arabic, a language further removed from their everyday parlance), nor to argue glibly that Shakespeare is our contemporary. Rather, my overriding aim is to help them see that the issues that matter most to them are far from being unique to their time and place and therefore are readily approachable via freshly novel ‘historical’ perspectives. A quote from Carl Weber, a Brecht-trained dramaturg, best illustrates the rationale underlying my approach: A thought of Brecht applies here, that distancing the familiar – by way of showing its counterpart in a foreign culture – will defamiliarize and problematize it, so it will be opened to new insights and intervention. The audience should not merely believe ‘These stage characters and their conflicts, that’s us!’ but rather conclude, ‘These characters have to cope with life’s vicissitudes as we do, but they do it in their own, quite different way and that raises questions about our way to cope!’ The audience should be enabled to identify with the play’s characters and at the same time clearly perceive their otherness.20



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Coda In 2016, Egypt joined the world in celebrating the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. So precisely what, to recall the trope used in my epigraph above, has the ‘radioactive isotope’ of Shakespeare revealed about the realities of Egypt in the last fifty-two years? Cultural hegemony, generational conflict and the continuing sub­ jugation of feminized voices are certainly among the themes paramount in Shakespeare’s works, but it would be a gross simplification to reduce the value of the work of the Bard to what he can teach us about these problems. For all we know, he seems intent to ‘teach’ us nothing, nor should we ever request of him to become so didactic. Safely dead as an overbearing authorial voice, Shakespeare continues to allow generations of artists and scholars all over the world to speak through his plays in order to raise questions about their most urgent plights and concerns. He may or may not hold a mirror up to nature, but he certainly does to the values of his times, yet he often chooses to refract them in different shapes rather than just reflect them. He questions them in the most complex and artistically ingenious manner, and the questions he raises continue to resonate with us. If the above snapshots are any indication, Egyptians are no exception to these dynamics. Hazem Azmy (1968–2018) was Assistant Professor of Drama and Theatre Criticism at Ain Shams University, Cairo, Deputy Editorin-Chief of al-Masraḥ (Theatre) quarterly, and the author of s­ everal articles about Egyptian theatre. He earned a PhD in Theatre ­Studies from the University of Warwick, UK, and co-founded and co-­ convened the Arabic Theatre Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research. To the great sadness of his friends and colleagues around the world, he passed away suddenly in July 2018. His monograph Staging Egypt on the Global Stage: Egyptian Performance Realities from 9/11 to the Arab Spring is due to be published posthumously.

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Notes 1. Maria Delgado and David Fancy, ‘The Theatre of Bernard-Marie Koltès and the “Other Spaces” of Translation’, New Theatre Quarterly 66 (May 2001): 141–60, at 143. 2. Hazem Azmy, ‘Egypt’, in Cambridge Companion to Theatre History, ed. David Wiles and Christine Dymkowski (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 116–35, at 127. 3. Ibid. 4. Nuʻmān ʻĀshūr, Al-Masraḥ wa-l-Siyāsa (Cairo: al-Hay’a al-Miṣrīyya al-ʻĀmma li-lKitāb, 1986), 49–50. 5. Mohamed Enani, ‘Introduction’, in Ezzeldin Ismail, The Trial of an Unknown Man, trans. M. Enani (Cairo: General Egyptian Book Organization, 1985), 16. 6. Margaret Litvin, Hamlet’s Arab Journey: Shakespeare’s Prince and Nasser’s Ghost (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). 7. Muḥammad ‘Inānī [Mohamed Enani], ‘‘Uṭayl Jadīd min al-Qāhira’ [A New ­Othello from Cairo], Al-Masraḥ 21 (September 1965): 78–82. 8. Nehad Selaiha, ‘Royal Buffoonery’, Al-Ahram Weekly, 4 April 2002. The article is no longer on the Al-Ahram website but is accessible via Internet Archive at: https://web. archive.org/web/20090726003902/http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2002/580/cu4.htm. 9. For a YouTube video of the relevant part of Shafik’s BBC interview, see http://bit. ly/shafik-bbc. 10. See Noha Ibraheem’s article in this volume on Dahsha, a TV adaptation of King Lear also featuring El-Fakharany (also spelled Yaḥyā al-Fakharāni). 11. Nehad Selaiha, ‘It’s All in the Move’, Al-Ahram Weekly, 6 May 2010, http://weekly. ahram.org.eg/Archive/2010/997/cu1.htm. 12. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBSTgQjI69M. 13. Sara Sa‘id, ‘“Waḥda Tānya Khālis” tushīr istiyā’ al-ḥarakāt al-nisā’iyya… wa al-­ fatiyāt: Tu‘abir ‘an al-wāq‘i’ [Women’s Rights Groups Indignant over ‘A Totally Different Person’; Young Women Say it Reflects Reality], al-Watan, 13 September 2013, http://www.elwatannews.com/news/details/319357. 14. For an online video and some commentary, see http://globalshakespeares.mit. edu/beware-of-eve-abdel-wahab-fatin-1962/. 15. Hala Shukrallah, ‘The Impact of the Islamic Movement in Egypt’, Feminist Review 47 (1994): 15–32, at 19–20. 16. Anne Barton, ‘The Taming of the Shrew’, in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. Harry Levin et al, 2nd edn (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 138. 17. See, e.g., Sid Ray, Holy Estates: Marriage and Monarchy in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 2004), 34–35 and 85–87. 18. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-Tw7WhH_aQ. Note that this interview has been handpicked and subtitled in English by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), a US-based organization dedicated to discrediting Arabs and Islam. 19. Hazem Azmy and Marvin Carlson, ‘Editorial: Against Cropped Truths’, Ecumenica 1, no. 2 (Special Issue on Performing Islam/Muslim Realities) (2008): 8–11, at 9. 20. Carl Weber, ‘Foreign Drama in Translation: Some Reflections on Otherness, Xenophobia, the Translator’s Task, and the Problems They Present’, in Dramaturgy in American Theater: A Source Book, ed. Susan Jonas, Geoff Proehl and Michael Lupu (Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1997), 266–75, at 271.

Part II Adaptation

&

Performance

& Chapter 6

The Taming of the Tigress Fat· ima Rushdī and the First Performance of Shrew in Arabic David C. Moberly

[French Officer:] ‘If only the Arabs had more women like you!’ [Faṭima Rushdī:] ‘All Arab women are like me.’ ‘You mean they are “actresses”?’ ‘I am only an actress on stage … As for now, I am just a free Arab woman, fighting for the great Arab nation.’1

The Taming of the Shrew occupies a unique place in Egyptian t­ heatre, standing at the intersection of its colonial and revolutionary history, framing the clashes between its westernized elites and its lower classes, and helping vocalize its evolving debates about the nature of women and the marriage relationship. Shrew has been translated multiple times for the stage, into both colloquial and more literary registers of Arabic, and several Egyptian film producers have adapted it for the screen.2 Indeed, the play remains one of the most popular Shakespeare comedies in the region and is a prominent Notes for this section begin on page 134.

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medium for discussion about proper marriage roles to this day.3 (To witness this, one need look no further than the 2016 production of Gamīla [Beautiful], an Egyptian adaptation of Shrew that has been pointedly advertised as contributing to just such a discussion.) Among Shakespeare’s comedies, Merchant is perhaps the strongest contender against Shrew in terms of popularity, as it has a strong history in the Arab world, fuelled in part by the Arab-Israeli conflict. Ramsīs ‘Awaḍ argues, however, that in Egypt between 1930 and 1980 Shrew was more popular, as evidenced by the large number of translations and adaptations of it into Arabic.4 Yet despite this popularity, the recent flurry of scholarship on Shakespeare in Arabic has looked mainly at tragedies such as Hamlet and Othello,5 replicating many Arab critics’ high-nationalist and masculinist focus on tragedy rather than comedy.6 (An exception is recent scholarship on the Arab reception of The Merchant of Venice, led by Mark Bayer and Katherine Hennessey.7) As nationalist assumptions in the region show their limits, it is time to broaden the frame. This article analyses the reception of The Taming of the Shrew in Arabic. Specifically, it focuses on the earliest Arabic version of Shrew: Bishāra Wākīm’s 1930 translation for the Egyptian stage, entitled al-Gabbāra (The Giantess), one of the earliest translations of Shakespeare into Egyptian colloquial Arabic (‘āmmiyya). After showing how this play came about and what made it unique for Egyptian audiences, the article concludes by contrasting it with Ibrāhīm Ramzī’s translation of Shrew into literary Arabic (fuṣḥā) just three years later, in 1933, at the request of the Egyptian Ministry of Education. Egyptian theatre critics who reviewed the 1930 performance present Shakespeare as an authority on the nature of women and their role in the marriage relationship. The play itself, however, starred and was co-produced by Fāṭima Rushdī (1908–96), an Egyptian actress and film idol (a mere twenty-two years old at the time), whose productions promoted the image of Egyptian women as strong, independent Arabs. Her backing of this early translation and staging of a Shakespeare play in Egyptian colloquial Arabic (­‘āmmiyya) – a choice that made it more accessible to women and other less literate Egyptians – is an example of the methods that contributed to this image. These kinds of high-quality ‘āmmiyya performances (for which Rushdī was famous) were popular, as, unlike fuṣḥā translations, they could be more fully appreciated and absorbed not

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only by the educated male elite, but also by a broad spectrum of the Egyptian public. This kind of Shakespearean theatre, however, was short-lived. It was soon overwhelmed by the relative wealth of the Egyptian government, which increased its controls on the theatre by funding and rewarding only fuṣḥā projects. Among these projects was Ibrāhīm Ramzī’s 1933 translation of Shrew into fuṣḥā, which would largely bury the memory of Rushdī’s production in favour of one backed by the educated elite.

The Giantess: Bishāra Wākīm’s 1930 Translation In 1930, the Fāṭima Rushdī Troupe performed the first production of The Taming of the Shrew in Arabic at the Printania [Brintāniyyā] ­T heatre in Cairo. Titled al-Gabbāra (The Giantess/Mighty Woman),8 the play used a translation by francophone-educated Egyptian actor (and later director) Bishāra Wākīm (1890–1949).9 Wākīm’s text (which is not extant, but may have translated Shakespeare through an intermediary source) made many cuts to Shakespeare: it shortened the play to four acts, removed Lucentio-centred subplots and featured only five named roles: Katherine, Petruchio, Baptista, Bianca and Grumio.10 The most widely noted element of this production, however, was the fact that Wākīm’s translation was in ‘āmmiyya, the local Egyptian dialect of Arabic used by both the literate and the illiterate, rather than in fuṣḥā, the higher-register form of Arabic in which theatre for the more educated upper classes was typically produced. Through the 1920s, ‘āmmiyya was often the dialect of choice for ‘lower’ genre comedic plays depicting Egyptian domestic life. The trend had begun very early in the history of Egyptian theatre, with the work of Ya‘qūb Ṣannū‘ (1839–1912), the first playwright to produce plays solely in ‘āmmiyya. For instance, his play al-Amīra al-Iskandarāniyya (The Alexandrian Princess), performed between 1870 and 1872, was an ‘āmmiyya comedy that – like Shrew – featured an unruly wife as the title character.11 The Giantess, however, represented the first time many Egyptian critics and theatre-goers could remember seeing a Shakespeare play translated completely into ‘āmmiyya performed on such a public stage.12 Previous translations of his plays in this generation had been into fuṣḥā, partially because the higher register was considered ‘proper’ for high literature, whereas the colloquial was the realm of lower ‘entertainment’.13 Fuṣḥā was also used in translations of Shakespeare for nationalistic

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reasons aimed at the preservation of a united Arab elite. In 1918, for example, in his famous translation of Othello, Khalīl Muṭrān had rejected the use of vernacular outright, stating his belief that it had ‘shattered the unity of the [Arab] nation’.14 In its novel use of the Egyptian dialect in an adaptation of Shakespeare, The Giantess reflected the evolving state of Egyptian theatre in the 1920s and 1930s. The play was performed in an era in Egypt when the independent, unregulated nature of the theatre market allowed for such productions, and in particular permitted women – who were far less likely to have received an education in any language at all, much less the fuṣḥā of the elite (aside from memorizing bits of the Qur’ān) – to flourish in the upper echelons of a growing field. Whereas other professions in 1920s Egypt often required workers to be able to read and use either a European language or fuṣḥā, light theatre did not, and many women filled positions as singers, dancers and actresses throughout the country. One of these women was Fāṭima Rushdī, who not only played the role of Katherine in The Giantess, but also co-owned and managed the troupe that performed it. Hers was one of the largest and most popular acting companies in Egypt at the time. She was the first woman to put together an acting company of its size in the Arab world. Even the company itself was named after her: the Fāṭima Rushdī Troupe.15 By 1930, Rushdī was well known as one of Egypt’s great actresses. She and her producers promoted her as the ‘Sarah Bernhardt of the East’, modelling her after one of the world’s most famous actresses of the previous generation (Bernhardt’s 1888 Egypt tour had been a sensation) and casting her in a number of Arabic-language productions of plays in which Bernhardt had previously starred, including Jeanne D’Arc, La Dame aux Camélias and La Tosca.16 Rushdī’s beginnings, however, were humble and not without tragedy. She was born to a lower class family in Alexandria as the fifth of five girls. Her father died when she was very young. Rushdī worked, along with her sister, as a singer at the Amīn ‘Aṭā Allāh Theatre in Alexandria to help provide for her family, despite her lack of education, taking advantage of the openness of the market at the time. Her very first night on stage, the great Cairo-based composer and singer Sayyid Darwīsh (1892–1923, also Sayed Darwish) heard her perform one of his songs and asked her mother’s permission to take her and her sister to the capital to work with him.17 She sang, danced and performed in casinos, theatres and coffee shops in Cairo throughout

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her pre-teen years.18 Since she only knew ‘āmmiyya, however, and was illiterate and uneducated in fuṣḥā, she was unable to work at the more respectable theatres in Cairo until 1923, when an opportunity came her way.19 In that year, at age 14, she met ʻAzīz ʻAyd (1884–1942) and Yūsuf Wahbī (1898?–1982), both of whom worked for the Ramsīs Theatre, founded by Wahbī, which had become one of the larger and more impressive theatres in Cairo.20 They were impressed with her potential, and she became the first woman hired at Ramsīs in three years.21 At this theatre, however, all roles were performed in fuṣḥā, so ʻAyd took on the task of training her.22 Rushdī was deeply affected by his teaching and by his artistic tastes, which included a healthy respect for fuṣḥā that went hand in hand with admiration for Shakespeare and Sarah Bernhardt.23 Her memoirs reflect the fire that he lit in this young actress: He [ʻAyd] showed me that true art is neither in old drama nor modern drama – as evidenced by Shakespeare’s plays, which were enacted hundreds of years ago, and are still produced in multiple countries, in all directions – but the crux of the art, or the sum of theatrical genius, never changed, because such universal plays touched the cores of [people’s] hearts, however diverse the nationality and varied the tastes of the masses. And all of this depended upon the spirit that drove those who undertook these roles, and became completely and totally ‘clothed’ in the desired character, as Sarah Bernhardt had done in enacting the roles of young men until she entered into general fame.24

ʻAyd filled Rushdī with confidence that she could be as great as even the greatest actresses in playing the roles of that great, true artist, Shakespeare. Rushdī adored ʻAyd, and eventually married him while still in her mid-teens, though he was about twenty-four years her senior. This odd marriage arrangement only served to reinforce the influence ʻAyd had on Rushdī’s artistic tastes, an influence that would last for a lifetime, even long after their divorce.25 As she said in her 1971 memoir: What was I in relation to ʻAzīz ʻAyd? I was, perhaps, for him, as ­Galatea was to the artist Pygmalion. I was for ʻAzīz ʻAyd that beautiful living thing that was made from the sap of his ideas and his experiences and his friendly artistic spirit, and his delicate temper and his hot blood and his strong passion, and he made from all of that a beautiful thing, and that thing was me, the beauty of art, which lifts humans above other organisms. If the artist loves his non-living creations, it is not surprising that ʻAzīz ʻAyd loved his living creation.26

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In these early days as a part of the Ramsīs Troupe, Rushdī describes herself as spending every waking moment working within ʻAyd’s training regimen: getting up at 7 am, then practising, performing and studying until 3 or 4 the next morning.27 She says of this time, ‘I did not live as a woman … The theatre was my lover and my passion and my husband and my child’.28 As part of ʻAyd’s programme of moulding her into an ideal actress, she was sent to al-Azhar in Cairo to take classes on the Qur’ān, where she learned high Arabic.29 She also studied the language with ʻAyd, who early on instructed her to use a simplified ‘āmmiyya form if she ever stumbled over complex fuṣḥā sentences on the stage.30 Not until she left the Ramsīs Troupe to form the Fāṭima Rushdī Troupe, and not until after she divorced ʻAyd, did she take on roles in Egyptian colloquial on a major stage.31

A Giant Experiment The Giantess was staged near the beginning of Rushdī’s growth in reputation as a popular actress in Egyptian colloquial Arabic. Her young company’s talent had only been firmly established a year earlier, in February and March of 1929, when she played Antony in her company’s version of Julius Caesar at the same time its more seasoned and well-known rival, the Ramsīs Troupe, was performing it at the Italianate Ramsīs Theatre, with Yūsuf Wahbī, a founder and star of Ramsīs, playing Antony.32 Tension between the two companies was exacerbated by the fact that Rushdī and her then-husband ʻAyd had only recently split away from the Ramsīs Troupe after a dispute about who was to be the company’s female star, Rushdī or Zaynab Sadqī.33 The publicity of the dual performances was magnified, however, not only by the two companies’ rivalry, but also by the fact that students in the Egyptian government’s secondary school system had all been assigned to read Julius Caesar at a time that exactly coincided with the productions.34 The two productions were so popular in Cairo that one could hardly go anywhere without hearing someone expressing an opinion about them. As Rushdī recalls: The rush to see this play in each of the two theatres was very intense … Comparison of the two plays circulated at the time in the streets and the coffee houses and the clubs, at schools and in offices, at agencies, in corporations, and everywhere. Comparisons were made of the scenery and the costumes and the props and the lights and the

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production and the performance of even the small roles and of the overall ensemble.35

Local magazines and newspapers combed through and compared every detail of the two productions.36 Rushdī states that her company set up daytime gatherings especially for students to help them with their studies, where the company would perform for them at no cost and lead discussions about the play. These gatherings caused her to become known as Ṣadīqat al-Ṭalaba, ‘Friend of the Students’, as in these gatherings she and her troupe used the play to teach moral lessons, ‘demonstrating how pride and egotism lead their owners to destruction – [as with] the pride and egotism of Caesar – and how bad guile afflicts none but its own – [as with] the guile of Cassius and his plot with the conspirators’.37 Later in that same year, in late November 1929, Rushdī followed in Sarah Bernhardt’s footsteps, playing the role of Prince Hamlet in her troupe’s performance of Hamlet. The Ramsīs Troupe also performed the same play, with well-established and famed Lebanese actor George Abyad in the main role. Once again, both companies staged the same play at the same time in a ‘struggle for the theatre movement in Egypt’, and, once again, the papers were filled with reports about the performances.38 This was the cultural context in which The Taming of the Shrew first premiered on the Egyptian stage: a world in which Egyptians followed, celebrated and debated Cairene performances of Shakespeare both as demonstrations of Egyptian and Arab artistic talent and as tools of moral and literary instruction. Critics praised R ­ ushdī’s performance as Katherine in The Giantess in 1930 just as they had her early work, though they recorded very few specific details about it. The press did note the young Rushdī’s unusual sway over the production, and over her director (and ex-husband!). Professor Taylor, for example, the English friend of theatre critic ‘Alī Aḥmad Balīgh, states in an Arabic-language publication at this time that ‘the actor in England [is] nothing but a chess piece in the hand of the director, … but I see in Egypt the opposite of this’. He points out the freedom with which Rushdī moved about the stage, and the prestige and recognition she received from the public in comparison to her director.39 (Aside from this we have few details of her performance.) Another reviewer stated that Rushdī ‘excelled in the role of Katherine the quarrelsome girl just as she mastered the role of the meek and submissive wife’.40 The same critic adds that ‘Aḥmad ‘Allām s­ ucceeded

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in performing the role of Petruchio, the husband who succeeds in breaking Katherine’s obstinacy’, and that ‘[t]he great artist ‘Azīz ʻAyd took great care in the direction of this play. The effects of this care were phenomenal in every scene that we saw, though it was even more prominent in the movements of the actors’.41 Another writer in al-‘Arūsa (The Bride), a local magazine, added to the praise of the performance, saying that the story achieved ‘great success … If we wanted to express our view of this play in one word, we would say to the individuals in this troupe: Bravo!’42 Despite the critics’ high praise for the actors, the most heated debate in local periodicals centred not on the performance, but on the choice made by its translator, Bishāra Wākīm, to translate The Taming of the Shrew into ‘āmmiyya rather than into fuṣḥā. Critics were stunned by Wākīm’s decision and did not hesitate to express their opinions on both sides as to whether this lower and ‘less literary’ dialect was worthy of being used in a translation of the great playwright Shakespeare. Said one arts critic for Miṣr, ‘[The play] was almost Egyptian if not for the European names and clothes and customs, as the Arabizer, Bishāra Wākīm, has deliberately put local expressions and Egyptian jokes into the play that we believe did not have their origin in the story’.43 Writers for al-‘Arūsa lamented: The Giantess permits the translation of the story The Taming of the Shrew into the language of the streets, and this is what makes us view it with an eye of sorrow, since we are unable to conceive of Shakespeare being relegated to the lowest of depths, yet Bishāra Wākīm has reduced us to such translations. Already we’ve seen Edmund Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac at the Majestic Theatre, Arabized into the same language that was used to Arabize Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. … [We] say to the Arabizer of the play: Shame on you!44

On the other side of the debate were critics who argued that Wākīm had succeeded in taking the essential idea of the play and Egyptianizing it completely, saying that ‘he combine[d] protection of and appreciation for the author in [just] the right amounts’.45 One argument was that, while it was not a good idea to translate some of Shakespeare’s plays into anything other than high-register, classical Arabic, The Taming of the Shrew, being a comedy that dealt with a ‘lower’ topic, was an exception.46 Said one critic for Miṣr: ‘[I]t is not appropriate to present a story such as The Giantess in anything other than common garb, because it is not one of the classic sto-

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ries that must rise above the understanding of the common people. Instead, it is among the stories that deal with a flaw that is more visible and prominent in the public sphere’.47 In other words, since Shrew resembled the comedic, domestic plays frequently performed in ‘āmmiyya more than it did Hamlet or Julius Caesar – classic stories that transcended ‘all the perceptions of the public’ – it was one play of Shakespeare’s that was well fitted for translation into ‘āmmiyya. In a similar vein, critics added that presenting Shakespeare in ‘āmmiyya had the advantage of better teaching the masses to respect Shakespeare, his works and their well-intentioned moral lessons. As the same critic for Miṣr wrote: It cannot be said about those who present things like this Shakespearean play, The Giantess, by Shakespeare the Great, in ‘āmmiyya, that they do not respect the place of the man or his literary station. On the contrary, they are more faithful and loyal to him, because they popularize his stories and spread his opinion and his ideas via a more accessible means of dissemination. They don’t lose the lower classes – which are normally more numerous than any of the other classes that come to see this wise author – and they spread his principles among them. The masses thereby gain respect for Shakespeare, … in a way that can be enjoyed and that achieves its intended end.48

Even this critic, however, tempers his praise of the translation by stating that some ‘appropriateness of expression was downgraded slightly by some of the ‘āmmiyya terms and expressions that we are familiar with in the common public sphere and that are loved by the lowly, common folk’.49 A final article, entitled ‘‘Āmmiyya in Shakespeare’s Plays’, criticized Wākīm’s translation for putting ‘degrading expressions’ into Katherine’s lines, since ‘Shakespeare did not descend to that level’.50 Nevertheless, it defended his decision to translate the play into ‘āmmiyya, saying: A great portion of this world consists of the common folk, whom principles more deeply affect and who welcome knowledge to the depth of their souls with complete easiness. And in this situation we see that there is respect for the author in transporting these principles to the souls/minds of the public and instilling them in their hearts, prompting them in the language that they understand.51

For some critics, then, translation into the colloquial dialect was permissible – even from the text of a writer as great as Shakespeare – for plays such as The Taming of the Shrew, plays Shakespeare had written ‘to advise the public and instruct them’.52 One view on what

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exactly this instruction was meant to be was articulated in an article tellingly subtitled ‘Shakespeare’s Opinion about Women’. This piece declares that ‘Shakespeare has shown his opinion of frankness/ bluntness in women in the play The Giantess’. The critic continues: What the writer [Shakespeare] puts forth in this story is the following conclusion: That if one lets go of a woman’s reins in her treatment and she is left with complete freedom in life, there is in these weak creatures the seed of a giantess of powerful ability. She brings to life what did not live – the most powerful causes of pain and disruption of the heart – and combines them. And if her halter is controlled and she is given a portion of freedom not extravagant, but calculated, she is as an angel from heaven; she sees all the savour of life in obeying her husband and respecting and loving him.53

This, perhaps for many, was the kind of life lesson that excused the performance’s use of the colloquial language. The lower classes needed to learn the proper way to control a woman’s ‘halter’. Shakespeare had written a play in which he expressed his opinion about this issue. Therefore, it was only proper to translate this particular Shakespearean play, at least, into the language of the masses. The message, in this instance, was more important than the medium – or language – used. The latter is, in fact, an opinion Rushdī herself expresses in her 1971 memoirs. In an early chapter, she relates one of her first conversations with ‘Azīz ʻAyd as a young, uneducated fourteen-year-old girl. She recalls that she told him that she planned to write a book, and that he observed: ‘So, you know how to read and write well’, a statement specifically directed at her knowledge of fuṣḥā. She replied that she could not, but added, ‘I have ideas, isn’t that enough?’54 Rushdī, then, inherited at a young age a respect for substance over style that appears to have remained with her as her career progressed and manifested itself in productions such as The Giantess. Nor is this particularly surprising, as in this period of Egypt’s history ‘āmmiyya increasingly became an ‘extra-national, subaltern textual language, occasionally and strategically employed by uneducated women’ to fight the elite, largely male hegemony represented by fuṣḥā (a word that, in Arabic, is closely associated with ‘style’ and ‘eloquence’).55 It was precisely Rushdī’s low-born background and her frequent use of ‘āmmiyya in her plays and films that would solidify her fame as a ‘girl of the country’, a true Egyptian-born star whose films and performances, said one Egyptian critic in her 1971 biography,

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‘provided us with human, Egyptian models for the first time’.56 The most famous of the ‘Egyptian models’ she provided were her roles in domestic dramas such as The Giantess, which often dealt with female independence, husband-wife relationships, and divorce. Her parts in the 1933 film al-Zawāj (The Marriage),57 in al-‘Azīma (Determination, 1939), in al-Ṭā’isha (The Fickle/Reckless Woman, 1946) and many other productions were those of outspoken Egyptian women facing the inequalities of married life and relationships head on, to comedic and/or tragic effect. Al-Zawāj (1933) was filmed not long after Rushdī’s divorce from ‘Ayd. Not only did Rushdī star in the film, but she served as both its director and its producer at the young age of twenty-five. It was a film in which she took great pride, shooting parts of it in Paris and Spain, at the old monuments of the Arab kingdom of al-Andalus, aiming, she said, at ‘the stirrings of the nationalistic spirit of the Arabs’ and reminding them of their great past.58 In this film, Rushdī plays a woman whose father forces her to marry a man she does not love. After seven years of marriage, she tries to run away from her unfaithful husband. During a chase in which police are seeking to execute a court ruling that she return to her husband, she runs in front of a vehicle and is killed. Al-‘Azīma (1939), produced after Rushdī’s remarriage to Kamāl Salīm (who served as director), is often considered one of the greatest Egyptian films of all time. It features Rushdī as Fāṭima, a young woman who seeks a divorce because her husband loses a prestigious government job.59 Al-Ṭā’isha (1946) features Rushdī as Fāṭima, a young woman who seeks a divorce from her husband, Riyyāḍ, instead favouring the younger Sāmī. The film climaxes, however, when her husband frustrates her plans and, seeing no way out, she commits suicide by drinking poison. Each of these films, taking place after Rushdī’s divorce from ‘Ayd and (in the case of the last two) after her remarriage, explore intimately and sympathetically the plight of women in difficult and even abusive marriages, the difficulty of securing a divorce and the degree to which the law left Egyptian women at their husbands’ mercy. Though many of the specifics of her 1930 performance of Katherine remain unknown, given this pattern in her filmography it is possible that her performance evoked a similarly harsh and hopeless portrayal of the reality of married life, combined with all of the empathy an actress so recently and publicly divorced from her director could convey. Either way, if Rushdī was a ‘true Egyptian

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model’, she was one who, throughout her career, called attention to issues important to independent-minded women at a crucial turning point in her nation’s history.

Conclusion As the 1920s progressed into the 1930s, models of female independence, at least on the officially sanctioned, elite Egyptian stage, if not on its screens, were dwindling in numbers. The Egyptian government increased its regulation of the theatre, requiring performers to obtain credentials at acting schools. Those who did not go overseas to meet this requirement were forced to attend Egypt’s Higher Institute for Dramatic Art, making it difficult for women with lower class backgrounds like Rushdī’s to even enter the profession, let alone succeed.60 With the world economic crisis of the late 1920s and early 1930s, independent theatre companies began to dwindle, and actors were increasingly forced to turn for aid to the government – which favoured fuṣḥā performances over ‘āmmiyya.61 In 1932, less than two years after the performance of al-Gabbāra, the Egyptian government announced that it would no longer finance any performances in ‘āmmiyya, making it difficult for women, who often could not obtain much education in fuṣḥā, to enter the field. No longer could independent artists make their way as they once had.62 Instead, the Egyptian Ministry of Education threw its considerable bulk behind new, authoritative, fuṣḥā translations of foreign plays for Egyptian students to both read and view on stage. Though Egyptian film­makers, as well as some theatrical troupes, continued to use ­‘āmmiyya as their primary medium, the ‘official’ government-sanctioned theatre saw less and less of the vernacular. In 1935, the government established the National Theatre Troupe, which, backed by some of the biggest names of the time in Egyptian literature and theatre, such as Taha Hussein and Naguib Mahfouz, would dominate the national scene and pointedly avoid presenting anything in ‘āmmiyya for a quarter of a century.63 Along with these projects, among the many others the government backed in this transitional period was London-educated Ibrāhīm Ramzī’s 1933 translation of The Taming of the Shrew (which he based on François-Victor Hugo’s French version of the play). Even Ramzī (1884–1949), a playwright who earlier had staunchly supported the use of ‘āmmiyya on stage, arguing in print that the

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dialect was fully capable of the literariness required in high theatre, and even wrote his own (unpublished) ‘āmmiyya dictionary, could (understandably) not resist the lure of the Egyptian pounds his government offered. His fuṣḥā translation, not Wākīm’s The ­Giantess, was the first published translation of Shrew into Arabic, and with government backing it would – unlike the ‘āmmiyya version performed by Rushdī’s troupe – have considerable staying power, particularly in print. Thus, within three years of the production of The Giantess, the Egyptian theatrical ‘shrew’ had presumably been ‘tamed’. Yet the impact of Rushdī’s performance has proven impossible to fully expunge from Egyptian minds. Contemporary accounts suggest that al-Gabbāra was the first production of Shrew in Arabic to refer to Katherine as a ‘tigress’.64 Thus, Ramzī’s unusual translation of the title of Shakespeare’s play suggests that the Fāṭima Rushdī Troupe’s performance may have left some influence on his mind: over the protests of his editors, Ramzī retitled The Taming of the Shrew as Tarwīḍ al-Nimra, or The Taming of the Tigress.65 The small, relatively helpless and furry rodent named in Shakespeare’s ­English title becomes in Ramzī’s a large, fearsome, predatory beast. In doing this, he grants the lead female role of the play, even before the first word of dialogue, the same imposing, threatening power as Wākīm’s title, The Giantess, did for Fāṭima Rushdī’s character. Perhaps, then, Rushdī’s portrayal of Katherine loomed in Ramzī’s mind as he worked. Perhaps this title, which remains a popular one for the play throughout the Arab world to this day, is a ghostly remnant of R ­ ushdī’s influence. Perhaps the Shrew, or Tigress, remains untamed.

Acknowledgements I am indebted to Nabil Matar, Katherine Scheil, Margaret Litvin, and Katherine Hennessey for their comments and suggestions in the process of writing this article, as well as to funding from the University of Minnesota for on-site research in Cairo. Special thanks is also due to Ahmed Elhasky, whose help navigating Cairo’s libraries was indispensable.

134 David C. Moberly

David C. Moberly is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Minnesota, completing a dissertation entitled ‘The Taming of the Tigress: Gender, Shakespeare, and the Arab World’. His work appears in chapters within Palgrave’s Dialectics of Orientalism in Early Modern Europe, Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare’s Broadcast Your Shakespeare, and the forthcoming Routledge Shakespeare and Global Appropriation handbook. He has also reviewed The Taming of the Shrew in the Egyptian film industry on MIT’s Global Shakespeares Video & Performance Archive.

Notes 1. Fāṭima Rushdī, Mudhakkirāt Fāṭima Rushdī: Sāra Birnār al-Sharq wa-­Mumaththilāt al-Masraḥ al-ʻArabī al-Ulā [Memoirs of Fāṭima Rushdī: Sarah Bernhardt of the East and First Actress of the Arab Stage] (Beirut: Dār al-Thaqāfa, 1962), 102. All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated. 2. The translations include Bishāra Wākīm’s 1930 al-Gabbāra, or The Giantess, Ibrāhīm Ramzī’s 1933 Tarwīḍ al-Nimra, or The Taming of the Tigress, and Suhayr al-Qalamāwī’s 1968 Tarwīḍ al-Sharisa, or The Taming of the Petulant Woman. Film versions include al-Zawja al-Sābi‘ (The Seventh Wife, 1950), Banāt Ḥawwā’ (The Daughters of Eve, 1954), Ah Min Ḥawwā’ (Beware of Eve, 1962), al-­Mutamarrida (The Unruly Woman, 1963) and Istākūzā (Crayf ish, 1996). For more on one Egyptian film version of Shrew, see Yvette K. Khoury’s ‘The Taming of the (Arab-­ Islamic) Shrew: Fatin ‘Abdel Wahab Re-frames Shakespeare’s Comedy for Egyptian Screen’, Literature-Film Quarterly 38, no. 2 (2010): 147–63. 3. See Ramsīs ‘Awaḍ, Shakespeare in Egypt (Cairo: Arab Centre for Research and Publishing, 1980), 22. 4. Ibid. 5. Margaret Litvin’s Hamlet’s Arab Journey: Shakespeare’s Prince and Nasser’s Ghost (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011) describes Hamlet and its role in the representation of Arab identity in Middle Eastern politics. Sameh Hanna’s ‘Decommercializing Shakespeare’ and Ferial J. Ghazoul’s ‘The Arabization of Othello’ explore the history of the cultural reception of Othello in the Middle Eastern region. See Hanna, ‘Decommercializing Shakespeare: Mutran’s Translation of Othello’, Critical Survey 19, no. 3 (2007): 27–54; Ghazoul, ‘The Arabization of Othello’, Comparative Literature 50, no. 1 (1998): 1–31. 6. The comedies remained untranslated and unperformed in Arabic until after a number of the tragedies had seen the stage. Othello was first translated in 1884, Romeo and Juliet in 1890, Julius Caesar in 1895, Macbeth in 1900 and Hamlet in 1901. By contrast, The Two Gentlemen of Verona did not appear until 1905, The Tempest in 1909 and A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1911. A notable exception to this trend is, again, The Merchant of Venice, which was one of the first Shakespeare plays to be translated into Arabic, in 1885. See Mohammed Baqir Twaij, ‘Shakespeare in the Arab World’ (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1973), 185.

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7. See Mark Bayer, ‘The Merchant of Venice, the Arab-Israeli Conflict, and the Perils of Shakespearean Appropriation’, Comparative Drama 41, no. 4 (2007–8): 465–92 and Katherine Hennessey, ‘Shylock in the Ḥaḍramawt? Adaptations of Shakespeare on the Yemeni Stage’, Arablit 3, no. 5 (June 2013): 5–24. 8. The word al-Jabbār is featured in the Qur’an (59:23) as one of the names of Allāh, emphasizing his power and might. It is variously translated as ‘the Compeller’, ‘the Enforcer of His decrees’ or ‘the Irresistible’. The title of Wākīm’s translation of Shrew feminizes the word and suggests (or mockingly exaggerates) Kate’s power over those around her. In Egyptian colloquial Arabic, the ‘j’ is pronounced as a hard ‘g’. 9. For Wākīm’s filmography, see ‘Bechara Wakim’ at the Internet Movie Database: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0906863. 10. Although the text of Wākīm’s translation is not extant, summaries of the performance written by theatre critics and published in local periodicals at the time offer a window into the basic structure of the play. One particularly thorough summary can be found in ‘Ali Aḥmad Balīgh, ‘Riwāyat al-Gabbāra ‘Alā Masraḥ Brintāniyyā’ [The Tale of The Giantess at the Printania Theatre], al-Siyāsa al-­ Usbu‘iyya 247 (29 November 1930): 22. 11. Mohamed A. Alkhozai, The Development of Early Arabic Drama, 1847–1900 (London: Longman, 1984), 164–66. 12. Said one critic in an article entitled ‘‘Āmmiyya in the Arabization of Shakespeare’s Play: On the Arabization of The Giantess’: ‘Perhaps the play The Giantess is the first of Shakespeare’s plays that we have seen Arabized into ‘āmmiyya (‘al-­ ‘Āmmiyya fī Ta‘rīb Riwāyyat Shaksbīr’, Miṣr (2 December 1930): 7, quoted in ‘Awaḍ, Shaksbīr fī Miṣr, 108. Ramsīs ‘Awaḍ also comments that ‘[t]he Arabization of Bishāra Wakīm was a unique experience in its style […] It was novel in its use of ‘āmmiyya rather than fuṣḥā’. See Ramsīs ‘Awaḍ, Shaksbīr fī Miṣr [Shakespeare in Egypt] (Cairo: al-Hay’a al-Miṣriyya al-‘Āmma lil-Kitāb, 1986), 107–8. 13. Najīb al-Ḥaddād and Iskandar Faraḥ’s 1890 adaptation of Romeo and Juliet as Shuhadā’ al-Gharām (The Martyrs of Love) is perhaps the first Shakespeare play to be performed in ‘āmmiyya. It was popular enough to be performed and re-­ performed by different troupes over the next twenty years. See Mark Bayer, ‘The Martyrs of Love and the Emergence of the Arab Cultural Consumer’, Critical Survey 19, no. 3 (2007): 6–26; Ziad Fahmy, Ordinary Egyptians: Creating the Modern Nation through Popular Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 70. See Fahmy, passim, on the literature/entertainment distinction. 14. Ghazoul, ‘The Arabization of Othello’, 4. 15. The other co-owner of the Troupe, ʻAzīz ʻAyd, Fāṭima’s ex-husband, once said to her: ‘Yes, they are men and you are a woman, the first woman to put together the first acting company in the East. Your sacrifices have differed in many ways from theirs. You have sacrificed for the theatre with your youth and your life. I know that the atmosphere became suffocating, and that it is difficult to deal with this atmosphere that is full of envy and grudges towards others’. Fāṭima Rushdī, al-Fannān ʻAzīz ʻAyd (Cairo: al-Hay’a al-Miṣriyya al-‘Āmma lil-Kitāb, 1984), 114. 16. For a partial listing, see Fāṭima Rushdī, Kifāḥī f ī al-Masraḥ wa al-Sīnimā [My Struggle in the Theatre and the Cinema] (Cairo: Dār al-Ma‘ārif bi-Miṣr, 1971), 53, 207–8.

136 David C. Moberly 17. Fāṭima Rushdī, Bayn al-Ḥubb wa al-Fann (Cairo: Miṭba‘a Sa‘dī wa Shandī, 1971), 27–28; Rushdī, Mudhakkirāt, 13–14. 18. Rushdī, Bayn, 29–31. 19. Rushdī comments on her illiteracy in her memoirs, and the way she was taught to work around it. She states: ‘ʻAziz would exclaim: “When you are confused, Fāṭima, about forming a sentence, try it in āmmiyya and say it with simplicity,” because I was at this time not very good at reading and writing because I did not go to school, and entered the stage when I was not yet married, at age 10’. See Rushdī, Bayn, 51. 20. Rushdī, Bayn, 43–44; Rushdī, Mudhakkirāt, 38. For more on Wahbī and Ramsīs Theatre, see Hazem Azmy, ‘Egypt,’ in The Cambridge Companion to Theatre History, ed. David Wiles and Christine Dymkowski (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 116–35, at 123–24. 21. Rushdī, Bayn, 60. 22. Ibid., 57. 23. Fāṭima Rushdī did not even know who Sarah Bernhardt was until she met ʻAyd. He told her in one of their early meetings that she could be a great actress, ‘even reaching the fame of Sarah Bernhardt’. Her response was: ‘Who is Sarah Bernhardt?’ See Rushdī, Bayn, 20. 24. Rushdī, Bayn, 48. Original text: ‫ بدليل أن روايات شكسبير تمثل منذ مئات‬,‫ويبين لى أن الفن الصحيح ليس فيه مسرح قديم ومسرح حديث‬ ,‫ أو خالصة العبقرية المسرحية ال تتغير‬,‫ ولكن صلب الفن‬,‫ كل فى اتجاه‬,‫السنين ويتم أخراجها في دول متعدده‬ ‫ ويتوقف هذا كله‬,‫ألنها روايات عالمية تلمس حبات القلوب مهما تعددت الجنسيات وتنوعت أذواق الجماهير‬ ‫ فسارة برنار‬,‫ ويتقمص الشخصية المطلوبة تقمصا كامال‬,‫على الروح التى تسيطر على من يقوم بهذه األدوار‬ .‫كانت تمثل أدوار الشباب حتى دخلت إلى السبعين عاما‬ 25. ʻAyd’s influence on Rushdī is openly acknowledged and emphasized by her in her biographical interviews. After his death, she published her own praise of his accomplishments and influence in her book, al-Fannān ʻAzīz ʻAyd. 26. Rushdī, Bayn, 54. Original text: ‫ كنت‬.‫ فقد كنت بالنسبة له جاالتيا للفنان بيجماليون‬..‫أما ماذا كنت بالنسبة لعزيز عيد؟‬ ‫بالنسبة لعزيز عيد ذلك الشىء الحى الجميل الذى يبذل له من عصارة فكره ومن‬ ‫ ومن أعصابه المرهفة ودمائه الحارة وعواطفه الجياشة‬,‫تجاربه وروحه الفنانة الصادقة‬ ‫ جمال الفن الذى يعلو باألنسان عن بقية‬,‫ الذى هو أنا‬,‫ليجعل من ذلك كله الشى الجميل‬ .‫ فال غرابة فى أن يتوله عزيز عيد بنتاجه الحى‬,‫ فإذا كان الفنان قد أحب نتاجه من األشياء غير الحية‬.‫الكائنات‬ 27. Ibid., 58. 28. Rushdī, Mudhakkirāt, 51. 29. Rushdī, Bayn, 50. 30. Ibid., 51. 31. It is possible, however, that ʻAyd played a significant role in the decision to perform Shrew in ‘āmmiyya. ʻAyd had staged several performances of al-Ḥaddād’s ‘āmmiyya adaptation of Romeo and Juliet two decades earlier, to some success. See Fahmy, Ordinary Egyptians, 70. 32. Rushdī, Mudhakkirāt, 56; Rushdī, Bayn, 72 33. Rushdī, Kifāḥī, 53; Rushdī, Bayn, 61–62.

‫‪137‬‬

‫‪ Faṭima Rushdī and the First Performance of Shrew in Arabic‬‬ ‫‪ 34. Rushdī, Bayn, 72–73.‬‬ ‫‪ 35. Ibid. Original text:‬‬

‫وقد كان الزحام على أشد‪ ,‬لمشاهدة هذه المسرحية في كال المسرحين … وكانت المقارنة بين المسرحيتين‬ ‫تدور وقتها فى الشوارع والمقاهى والنوادى والمدارس والمصالح والهيئات وفى كل مكان‪.‬‬ ‫‪ 36. A more complete review of the criticism in Egyptian periodicals of these two‬‬ ‫‪performances can be found in ‘Awaḍ, Shaksbīr fī Miṣr, 118–26.‬‬ ‫‪ 37. Ibid., 73. (See also Rushdī, Mudhakkirāt, 52.) Original text:‬‬ ‫فأظهرت كيف أن التعاظم والغرور يؤديان بصاحبهما إلى الدمار‪ ,‬تعاظم وغرور يوليوس قيصر‪ .‬وكيف أن‬ ‫المكر السىء ال يحيق إال بأهله‪ .‬مكر كاشيس وتآمره مع المتآمرين‪.‬‬ ‫‪ 38. For an idea of the kind of criticism published on these performances at this time,‬‬ ‫‪see ‘Awaḍ, Shaksbīr fī Miṣr, 87–88.‬‬ ‫‪ 39. Alī Aḥmad Balīgh, ‘Masraḥiyāt Shaksbīr ‘Alā al-Masraḥ al-Miṣrī’ [Shakespeare’s‬‬ ‫‪Plays on the Egyptian Stage], al-Siyāsa al-Usbu‘iyya 249 (13 December 1930): 19.‬‬ ‫‪Original text:‬‬ ‫الممثل في إنجلترا ليس اال قطعر من الشطرنج في يد المخرج … ولكن رأيت في مصر عكس ذلك‪.‬‬ ‫‪ 40. ‘al-Gabbāra ‘Alā Masraḥ Brintāniyyā – Ra’ī Shaksbīr fī al-Mar’a’ [The Giantess at‬‬ ‫‪the Printania Theatre – Shakespeare’s Opinion about Women], Miṣr, 28 Novem‬‬‫‪ber 1930, 7, quoted in ‘Awaḍ, Shaksbīr fī Miṣr, 107. Original text:‬‬ ‫فاطمة رشدي أجادت في دور كاترين الفتاة الشرسة كما أجادت في دور الزوجة المطيعة الوديعة‪.‬‬ ‫‪ 41. Ibid. Original text:‬‬ ‫وأن أحمد عالم نجح في أداء دور بتروشيو الزوج الذى أفلح فى كسر شكيمة كاترين‪.‬‬ ‫أعتنئ االستاذ الفنان الكبير عزيز عيد باخراج هذه الرواية عناية كانت آثارها ظاهرة في كل منظر من‬ ‫‪.‬المناظر التى شاهدناها بل لقد كانت أشد بروزا حتى في حركات الممثلين وتنقالتهم‪.‬‬ ‫‪ 42. ‘Riwāyyat al-Gabbāra’ [The Story of The Giantess], al-‘Arūsa 305 (3 December‬‬ ‫‪1930): 15, quoted in ‘Awaḍ, Shaksbīr fī Miṣr, 109. Original text:‬‬ ‫… نجحت نجاحا كبيرا وأن اخراجها وتمثيلها يدعوان الى االعجاب‪ .‬فاذا أردنا أن نعبر عن رأينا في هذه‬ ‫الرواية بكلمة واحدة فاننا نقول ألفراد الفرقة (برافو(…!‬ ‫‪ 43. ‘al-‘Āmmiyya’, Miṣr, 7. Original text:‬‬ ‫بل تكاد تكون ممصرة لوال األسماء والمالبس والعادات االفرنجية‪ ,‬فقد تعمد المعرب االستاذ بشارة‬ ‫واكيم أن يضع فيها االصطالحات (البلدية) والنكات المصرية ما نعتقد أنه لم يكن له أصل في الرواية‬ ‫‪ 44. ‘Riwāyyat al-Gabbāra’, 15–16, quoted in ‘Awaḍ, Shaksbīr fī Miṣr, 109. Original text:‬‬ ‫فالجبارة اذن تعريب رواية (تامنج أوف ذى شرو) بلغة الشوارع وهذا ما يجعلنا ننظر اليها بعين األسف‬ ‫ألننا ال نستطيع أن نتصور شكسبير وقد هبط الى هذا الدرك السحيق‪ .‬وقد عودنا بشارة واكيم على أمثال هذه‬ ‫الترجمات‪ .‬وسبق أن رأيناه يمثل بمسرح الماجستيك (سيرانو دى برجراك) المعربة عن ادمون روستان‬ ‫باللغة التى عربت بها (ذى تامنج أوف ذى شرو) عن شكسبير‪...‬نقول‪...‬لمعرب الرواية (اخس عليك!(‪.‬‬ ‫‪ 45. ‘Awaḍ, Shaksbīr fī Miṣr, 108. Original text:‬‬ ‫يجمع بين األمانة وتقدير المؤلف األجنبى حق قدره‬

‫‪138 David C. Moberly‬‬ ‫‪ 46. This opinion of Shrew is evident in Egypt at least as early as the Atkins Troupe’s‬‬ ‫‪1927 performance, about which Bonamy Dobree wrote in the Egyptian Gazette on‬‬ ‫‪24 November 1927: ‘this hearty, knockabout farce, if rather crude, rollicks along,‬‬ ‫‪and makes us laugh if not profoundly, at least continuously, till we find ourselves‬‬ ‫‪giggling at jokes our self-respect would certainly forbid us to make. In fact, it is‬‬ ‫‪all a great lark’ (‘Awaḍ, Shakespeare in Egypt, 77–78).‬‬ ‫‪ 47. ‘Awaḍ, Shaksbīr fī Miṣr, 108. Original text:‬‬ ‫روايةكالجبارةلميكنمنالمناسبأنتخرجفيغيرهذاالثوبالعامى‪,‬ألنهاليستمنالرواياتالكالسيكالتىيجب‬ ‫أن تسمو عن مدارك العامة‪ .‬ولكنها من الروايات التى تعالج عيبا قد يكون أكثر ظهورا وبروزا في‪.‬‬ ‫األساط العامة‬ ‫‪ 48. Ibid., 108–9. Original text:‬‬ ‫فالذين يخرجون مثل هذه الرواية (الجبارة) لشكسبير العظيم باللغة العامية ال يمكن أن يقال عنهم أنهم ال يحترمون‬ ‫مكانة الرجل وال يحترمون منزلته األدبية‪ .‬بل هم على العكس أكثر اخالصا ووفاء له ‪,‬ألنهم يعممون روايته‬ ‫وينشرون رأيه وفكره بأوسع وسائل النشر‪ ,‬وال يضيعون على الطبقات الدنيا وهى فى العادة أكثر عددا من‬ ‫سواها من الطبقات األخرى أن تصل اليها آراء هذا المؤلف الحكيم وأن تتغلغل مبادئها في نفوسهم‪ .‬وهم لذلك‬ ‫يرون من االحترام لشكسبير ال من التسفيه له أن تظهر آثاره بالشكل الذى يعجبها ويحقق الغاية‪.‬‬ ‫المقصودة منها‬ ‫‪ 49. Ibid., 109. Original text:‬‬ ‫كان األليق بالمعرب أن يسمو ولو قليال عن الهبوط الى بعض االصطالحات والعبارات العامية التي لم نألفها‬ ‫في األوساط العامة العادية والتي يهوى اليها السوقة وطغام الناس عادة‪.‬‬ ‫‪ 50. ‘al-‘Āmmiyya fī Riwāyyat Shaksbīr’ [‘Āmmiyya in Shakespeare’s Plays], al-Ṣawā‘iq‬‬ ‫‪3 (5 December 1930): 12, quoted in ‘Awaḍ, Shaksbīr fī Miṣr, 109.‬‬ ‫‪ 51. Ibid. Original text:‬‬ ‫القسم األكبر من هذا العالم من جماع العوام الذين تؤثر فيهم المادئ أعمق تأثير وتصل التعليمات الى أعماق‬ ‫نفوسهم بسهولة تامة‪ .‬وفي هذه الحالة نرى أن احترام المؤلف هو في ايصال هذه المبادئ الى نفوس العامة‬ ‫وغرسها في قلوبهم وتلقينهم اياها باللغة التى يفهمونها‪.‬‬ ‫‪ 52. Ibid., quoted in ‘Awaḍ, Shaksbīr fī Miṣr, 110.‬‬ ‫‪ 53. ‘al-Gabbāra ‘Alā Masraḥ Brintāniyyā’, 7, quoted in ‘Awaḍ, Shaksbīr fī Miṣr, 107.‬‬ ‫‪Original text:‬‬ ‫والذى يخرج به الكاتب من هذه القصة هو النتيجة اآلتية‪ .‬ان المرأة اذ أطلق لها العنان في المعاملة وتركت‬ ‫لها الحرية التامة في الحياة كان من هذه المخلوقة الضعيفة ثمرة جبارة قادرة قوية‪ .‬تعيش ما عاشت من‬ ‫أقوى أسباب األلم والتنغيص للوسط الذى يضمها‪ .‬وهي اذا ملكت قيادها‪ ,‬وأعطيت من الحرية نصيبا غير‬ ‫وفير وبحساب‪ ,‬كانت مالكا من السماء‪ ,‬ترى كل لذتها في الحياة أن تطيع زوجها وأن تحترمه وتحبه‪.‬‬ ‫‪ 54. Rushdī, Kifāḥī, 17–18. Rushdī further quotes herself as saying, in the same‬‬ ‫‪conversation: ‘What’s so important about reading and writing? The important‬‬ ‫‪thing is the ideas that inspire the man, so that he may express them in whatever‬‬ ‫‪way, so long as his head is teeming with various thoughts’. See also Rushdī,‬‬ ‫‪al-Fannān, 30.‬‬ ‫‪ 55. Sarah Selim, The Novel and the Rural Imaginary in Egypt, 1880–1985 (London:‬‬ ‫‪Routledge Curzon, 2004), 42.‬‬ ‫‪ 56. Fikrī Abāẓa, al-Jumhūriyya, 31 July 1969, quoted in Rushdī, Bayn, 13.‬‬

Faṭima Rushdī and the First Performance of Shrew in Arabic

139

57. Mona L. Russell, Egypt (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2013), 340 and Rebecca Hillauer, Encyclopedia of Arab Women Filmmakers (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2005), 30, state that Rushdī burned all copies of this film. This, however, is a misreading of her 1971 memoir, in which she mentions the burning of copies of her 1928 film Under the Light of the Sun. See Rushdī, Bayn, 114. 58. Rushdī, Kifāḥī, 139; Rushdī, Bayn, 98–99. 59. In 2007 al-Ahrām, Egypt’s top government-owned daily newspaper, polled critics as to what the fifteen best films in Egyptian cinema history were. al-‘Azīma came in seventh, and was by far the oldest of the films listed. 60. Cathlyn Mariscotti, Gender and Class in the Egyptian Women’s Movement, 1925– 1939: Changing Perspectives (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2008), 128–29. 61. Muhammad Mustafa Badawi, Early Arabic Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 139. 62. Mariscotti, Gender and Class, 129; Jacob M. Landau, Studies in the Arab Theatre and Cinema (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 1958), 91; Badawi, Early Arabic Drama, 139. This is not, however, to say that colloquial theatre was dead. For more on the history of colloquial theatre in Egypt after 1930, see Walter Armbrust, Mass Culture and Modernism in Egypt (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 63. Badawi, Early Arabic Drama, 139. 64. Wākīm’s translation appears to have altered the text in the first act so that those trying to warn Petruchio against pursuing Katherine refer to her as a ‘monster’ or ‘beast’ as well as a ‘tigress’. Balīgh, ‘Riwāyat al-Gabbāra ‘Alā Masrah Brintāniyyā’, 22. 65. Ibrāhīm Ramzī, Tarwīḍ al-Nimra (Cairo: Wizāra al-Ma‘ārif al-‘Amūmiyya, 1933). It is possible that Wakīm derived the term ‘tigress’ from Gremio’s line in 1.2.194, in which he describes her as a ‘wild-cat’. Ramzī, however, does not appear to have translated the title based on this line. He translates ‘wild-cat’ literally, as al-qiṭṭa al-mutawaḥḥisha, not as nimra, or ‘tigress’ (45).

& Chapter 7

The Tunisian Stage Shakespeare’s Part in Question Rafik Darragi

In March 2007, 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?1

The play in question was Othello, Etoile d’un Jour, and despite this remark, the performance met with some success. It is today a well known fact that though the place of Shakespeare in the Tunisian cultural heritage still remains very far from that ‘Bardolatry’ imagined by George Bernard Shaw, his reputation and status in Tunisia cannot seriously be questioned. Despite the turmoil the Arab world has Notes for this section begin on page 150.



The Tunisian Stage: Shakespeare’s Part in Question

141

been witnessing since 11 September 2001, there has always been in this small, north African country situated at a crossroads in the Mediterranean Sea, a respectful admiration for the English ‘bard’.2 In fact, what is at stake, even in this crucial period, is more than a literary reputation or a religious ostracism. Largely because of its historical background, the perception of the Tunisian audience is forcibly different. In this small, French-speaking, Arab country, people do not know much of English civilisation and literature in general, and of Shakespeare in particular. Therefore, there is no need to say that the Tunisian director, just like any Arab director, has to take into consideration not only the financial repercussions of his choice but also the moral code of his society and therefore show some restraint when dealing with any foreign work. This article will examine three adaptations, Richard III, Othello, and Romeo and Juliet, by three outstanding contemporary directors, Mohamed Kouka, Tawfiq Al Jibali and Mohamed Driss, who, each in his way, marked a determination not to follow Shakespeare literally but rather to appropriate him to clear-cut, well defined aims. Following Tunisia’s independence in 1956, the early theatrical performances were generally in line with the traditional French trend: that is, they concerned serious, classical tragedies in keeping with the great political events of the time. Most of the directors stuck to universal masterpieces in which literary genres were walled off from one another. Among the major Shakespeare productions of the Troupe de la Ville de Tunis, the oldest institutional stage company, between 1954 and 2006, we may mention The Merchant of Venice, Julius Caesar, Othello, Hamlet and Richard III. They were of course in literary Arabic. The theatre’s most recent Shakespeare production was Richard III (1984 and 1992). The adapter and director was Mohamed Kouka, who started his career first in France where he worked over a period of twelve years with such prestigious figures as Jerzy Grotowski, Antoine Vitez and Pierre Débauche. In 1977 he acted at the Festival d’Avignon in a play, Le Collier des Ruses, adapted from the Maqamat of Badi‘ al-Zaman al-Hamadhani, before returning home to direct the Troupe de la Ville de Tunis. Kouka, who is currently in charge of cultural affairs in the munici­ pality of Tunis, has always admired Shakespeare: Shakespeare’s modernity is time-challenging. I have worked with him on three occasions, more or less successfully, for he is an extremely complex playwright: Julius Caesar, Richard III, and Measure for

142 Rafik Darragi

­ easure. I do not consider him as our contemporary. He is our model, M to be questioned in order to comprehend the world today.3

As one might guess, despite the director’s good intentions, Richard III was not very successful. The Tunisian public was not familiar with English history in general and with the Wars of the Roses in particular, its cultural heritage being totally different. The English traditions, history and religion, are barely known in the former French colonial empire, which included many Arab countries. Even today, such writers as Molière or Racine are much more known and much more often adapted than Shakespeare. As a matter of fact, ten years earlier, in 1972, another Shakespearean adaptation, Macbeth, produced by the well known actor and director Mohamed Souissi, had suffered the same fate.4 That was one of the experiences that had built up Shakespeare’s reputation as a highly difficult source of inspiration. Only Hamlet and Othello met with great success, but that was fifty years ago, owing to the genius and courage of a great actor and director, now dead, Aly Ben Ayed, as well as to the prevailing situation. At that period, the theatre audience was still largely made up of a solid, Western-educated elite, including the director himself, well aware of Shakespeare’s importance on the world stage. The Tunisian press, in general, was not very warm about the first performance of Kouka’s Richard III, which took place in Hammamet in the summer of 1984. In an article entitled ‘The Theatrical Intention’, a leading journalist criticised it in harsh terms: To choose Shakespeare is all right; but what about the Tunisian ­theatre? What about the Tunisian public? And, in a word, what is the usefulness of Shakespeare as rendered in this full-size dimension … to the promotion or even to the popularisation of the theatre in our country?5

No less indicative of the prevailing situation in that period was the fact that the general trend was to promote young playwrights, as Tunisian literary playwrights were rather scant in those days. Among those who benefited from this trend were Samir Ayadi, Mohamed Rached Hamzaoui, Amor Ben Salem and Ezzeddine Madani, the translator of Kouka’s Richard III. Mohamed Kouka who, in addition to directing the play, played the role of Richard, did expect this unfavourable attitude. He was well aware that Shakespeare’s impact on Tunisian theatre was still lim-



The Tunisian Stage: Shakespeare’s Part in Question

143

ited, but the temptation to carry out his project was great. As head of the major theatrical institution of the country, he had relatively significant human and financial resources at his disposal. What accounted then for his choice was the aura attached to the English bard’s name as well as the rich allegorical, religious and political possibilities of his play. As a former actor in France for over twelve years, Kouka could not ignore the importance of Shakespeare. This is what he wrote of Richard III: Richard III is a fable, a quite current, luminous one, about the workings of ambition and the practice of politics in its purest form, where the only operational arguments are murder, physical liquidation and rigged trials.6

Thus beneath the light satirical vein which tinged some of his scenes and speeches, there often lurked a loophole which the spectator was invited to fill in by himself. For instance, implicit in his presentation of the would-be king Richard deeply absorbed in the reading of the Bible was the close interrelation between the working of an elaborate system of ephemeral political alliances and the more and more predominant religious order. In the same manner, the peculiar, vaguely oriental costumes of the characters, the work of a French designer, were meant to suggest the religious element of the play and the impending threat seen in these characters’ inability to see beyond the frontiers of their faith. Kouka writes: The use of religion as a political argument to seduce the people led me to dress the characters in Richard III in Ayatollah costumes.7

In that period, however, the audience, as well as the press, failed to notice this detail. The religious threat in Tunisia was not yet so overwhelming. In his article about the play, Messaoudi referred to these costumes simply as being ‘too jolly oriental (Persian?)’. Yet, produced anew in the early 1990s, still in classical Arabic, the play once again took aim at the fundamentalism upsurge now looming everywhere in the Arab world, including Tunisia. Mohamed Kouka’s intentions are crystal-clear: Today, we are living in a world where, under the cover of the sacred, a certain ‘religious’ hope is striving to destroy mankind. We must go back to Shakespeare to try to understand and to react.8 What’s new? Shakespeare!

144 Rafik Darragi

This statement, written in May 2007, is, of course, an important stand which must be underlined, since, in Tunisia, as in all Arab countries, especially when it comes to political and religious motives, writers as well as directors are usually required to adopt some self-inflicted censorship. This stems, of course, from a pragmatic concern, in particular since 11 September 2001. Among the various sets and props in Mohamed Kouka’s ­Richard  III, one must mention the huge tower standing in the middle of the stage. As expected, most of the spectators failed to link it with the famous London monument. A well known journalist who wrote about the performance even blamed the producer for it. In a long article entitled ‘Lifeless’, she wrote: ‘The tower set up right in the middle of the stage has not been fully exploited. Symbolizing ­Richard III’s ascension, and at the same time, his end, it finally served as his gallows’.9 In fact, in her article, this journalist went so far as to doubt the capacity of Mohamed Kouka to perform Shakespeare, deeming his attempt ‘an act of courage’ and ‘almost a challenge’ before concluding peremptorily: ‘This show did not pass the footlights’. It is worth noting that this journalist, Faouzia Mezzi, who is currently editor-in-chief of the newspaper La Presse de Tunisie, is the very person who wondered in March 2007 about Driss’ decision to adapt Othello, thus confirming her still widely shared view that Shakespeare is too elitist. However, contrary to Richard III, Othello remains a very popular play not only in Tunisia but also throughout the Arab world, as the appropriation of the hero does not present any major difficulty. Probably because of the Arabisation of his name, ‘Utayl’, by the early Arabic translator Khalil Mutran, he is commonly considered not as a black man but as a brave, though impetuous, dark-skinned Arab living in a hostile milieu, and an unhappy victim of love. For instance, Saad Al-Khadim’s adaptation, Doctor Othello, written in 1965, was concerned mainly with jealousy and violence. Today this play supports a wider range of interesting, very challenging issues, such as racism, war and, more recently, integration and identity.10 In Tunisia we registered two different performances of Othello within a decade. The first was staged in 1997/98. The director and adapter, Tawfiq Al Jibali, is a well known figure of the Tunisian stage. In the 1980s he established an independent space, El Teatro, that soon became the main venue for new experiments. The scenography of Othello was the work of Mohsen Raïs, for which he was awarded



The Tunisian Stage: Shakespeare’s Part in Question

145

a prize at the 1998 Cairo International Festival of Experimental ­T heatre. The production, which lasts less than one and a half hours, is made up of modern choreography designed by Malak Sebaï. The synopsis as shown in the French programme notes, does not reveal much about this adaptation, though it alludes to the notion that an all-white world, today, is simply a fantasy or an anachronism: In a place between the instant and what precedes it. After the passion and beyond. Before the act and against the act, ghosts and shadows … Strategic insomnia and premeditated desire … in a cold, narcisstic space. Game of roles in a tragedy which Shakespeare could have written for another spectator … By the way, is Shakespeare really an Arab?11

This adaptation has two characters only. Othello, who is white, is played by Ziyed Touati, and Desdemona, who is black, by Afaf Hagi. The racial theme in the play seems to be central not because of the attitudes and speeches of the characters as usual but because of the original handling of the play. Everything is upside down. First of all, the characters of the Shakespearean play have disappeared. No traces of such characters as Brabantio, Roderigo, Emilia, or even Iago, can be found. Afaf Hagi, in a long white dress, and Ziyed Touati, wearing black tights, appear throughout the performance as two highly qualified dancers rather than actors, harmoniously occupying the stage. Though naked and dim, this stage shows in a recess a white couch, reminding the spectator of the tragedy to come. The overall theme is narrated through a terse, spare dialogue in a mixture of classical Arabic and Tunisian colloquial Arabic. Between their exchanges, the two characters keep dancing or watching a television set displaying extracts from World War II. The most striking one is a clip of the British Prime Minister, Sir Winston Churchill, delivering his famous speech on 13 May 1940 in the House of Commons: ‘I would say to the House, as I said to those who have joined this Government: “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat”’. Evidently this reference to the war may well allude to the dichotomy between two worlds, the white against the black, the blind violence of Othello pitted against the innocence and purity of Desdemona. Yet, like in Kouka’s Richard III, the spectator is also deftly invited to operate an association of ideas and to link, in this

146 Rafik Darragi

a­ daptation, World War II as embodied by Sir Winston’s appearances, not only to the original creator of the play, but also to the wars waged by Othello. The subtlety lies in this double-edged satirical barb aimed at both racism and war. By choosing to put on stage a white Othello and a black Desdemona, Tawfiq Al Jibali did, of course, emphasise the human condition as a whole. Not only did he stress the universality of the jealous passion susceptible to strike anybody on earth, no matter what the colour of his skin, but he also underlined that ­Minotaur called ‘war’, the very plight of humanity. In his adaptation, the battlefield has changed; the war is no longer confined, as in Shakespeare, to Cyprus and the Mediterranean Sea; it concerns the whole world. Shown on the screen, its dimensions appear on a larger scale, outdoing, in terms of violence, the wars of Shakespeare’s initial hero. War is also emphasised in Mohamed Driss’ Othello or The One Day Star. Described as ‘a spectacle of theatrical culture’,12 this adaptation of Shakespeare’s play was performed for the first time early in 2007 and drew a large audience. In contrast to Tawfiq Al Jibali’s, this work, which lasts over two and a half hours, faithfully follows Shakespeare’s dramatic structure. Othello, played by brilliant Tunisian actor Jemal Sassi, wears a wig evoking a black man’s hair, and Desdemona is a young white girl, Nadra Toumi. Like Kouka, Mohamed Driss has publicly confessed his admiration for the English bard: I have always appreciated the Shakespearean theatre … Shakespeare is a work of maturity. His theatre shows a process that underlines the detail. Consequently it is not true that it shows redundancy. There is, on the contrary, a multilevel writing.13

Accordingly, he thought it appropriate to introduce in what he terms his ‘personal version’ of Othello, ‘a realistic dimension’ (ibid.) in the form of many silent intercut scenes and musical interludes intended to offer the spectator a multiplicity of interpretations. Though silent, these creative additions speak for themselves, prompting the audience to think about such crucial problems as war, power relations and racism. This is how he explains the motivations which led him to adopt such devices: Laurence Olivier or Orson Welles have underlined particularly ­Othello’s psychological drama; Zeffirelli has aestheticised it, let’s say he has, in a way, ‘romanticised’ it. Myself, I have ‘socialised’ it. In fact, I placed Othello within an order that functions on several levels; therefore it is not only the personal drama that comes out. Take, for



The Tunisian Stage: Shakespeare’s Part in Question

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instance, the example of military education. I show in the play that power is based on hierarchy. Even today, when one speaks of Cyprus or Turkey, what do we hear? The Turkish Constitution is still under the protection of the army; it is protected neither by Parliament nor by the Constitutional Council (ibid.).

Indeed, the military atmosphere is very much emphasised throughout the play. In addition to the various battle scenes, almost all the men appearing on stage do wear, at one point or another, a modern army uniform. Even Brabantio, addressing himself to the Venetian authorities, appears wearing the imposing uniform of a high-­ ranking officer. The mere brawl initiated by Iago between Cassius and Roderigo is transformed into a spectacular military coup d’état. The Tunisian spectator may wonder a while to see such strange scenes, apparently unconnected to the usual Shakespearean story, taking place suddenly in front of him: people appearing and disappearing in a misty Turkish bath while photographers steal pictures; Desdemona, in Cyprus, dressed in a military uniform; Emilia in a short skirt ready to play tennis with her mistress; Iago talking on a cellular phone; Othello dancing a graceful waltz with Desdemona; the corpse of Brabantio lifted in the air in front of two white-dressed female nurses; soldiers fighting with explosives and Kalashnikovs; acrobats revolving in the air above the stage; or Iago, in the final scene, pent up in an iron cage dangling in the air just above Desdemona’s corpse. Indeed, the spectator may wonder, but not for long. Because he knows, from experience, that Mohamed Driss is a producer who always gives him something new. As head of the major public theatre institution since its beginning, Driss has been very much involved in the modern evolution of the Tunisian stage. He is today especially known for his generous and colourful technique, largely inspired by his love for the circus. As a matter of fact, in 2003 Driss became the first producer to set up a circus school in Tunisia. This accounts for the great number of young acrobats and dancers evolving throughout his works. It is an original technique which imposes the presence of the body, allowing the producer a complete freedom of action in the development of the plot. Moreover, because his Othello adaptation, set in Venice and Cyprus in the Renaissance period, is written, as usual, in Tunisian colloquial Arabic, it does not take long for the spectator to realise that all these short, unexpected silent scenes as well as the

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a­ crobatic shows are the director’s characteristic personal touch. Driss had already used such devices in almost all his previous performances, notably in Rajel Wa Mra, Wannas El-Kloub, Dahdah Ray, Al ­Mutachabitun and, particularly, Aïchou Shakespeare. If we go back in time and seek the signs which foreshadowed Driss’ Othello, we must necessarily refer to his early, light adaptation of Romeo and Juliet. This work bears a significant title: Aïchou Shakespeare, which means in Tunisian colloquial Arabic ‘Viva Shakespeare’. It was first performed in the summer of 1988 and was a great hit, probably Driss’ greatest so far, rivalling only Le Maréchal, an adaptation of Molière’s Le Bourgeois gentilhomme. Both plays were written in Tunisian colloquial Arabic. In its original form, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet could not appeal to the Tunisian audience, given its setting and its intricate, convoluted plot. To this author’s knowledge, not a single performance of that play has been recorded in the history of the Tunisian theatre over the last fifty years. Yet from this play, Mohamed Driss coaxed a vivid, humourous performance. Gathering together several famous stereotyped constructions inspired by the film West Side Story, some dances and some quarrels, he compounded them into a single, coherent spectacle. Somehow, infusing dancing and music turned this romantic, tragic story into a magic show, creating one of the most important stage events in the country in recent years.14 As shown during that summer evening, the real structural foundation of Aïchou Shakespeare was not so much the intrigue but rather the fluid, almost cinematic speed of the action and the impetuous flow of puns in Tunisian colloquial Arabic, mixed with words and expressions in French, overflowing the performance and creating dizzying joy and hilarity among the audience. Right from the first scenes, such French terms as ‘Bonjour’, ‘Je suis mordu’, ‘Dommage!’, ‘Attention’, ‘Bulldozer’, ‘la preuve’ and ‘­grillage’, and expressions like ‘C’est incompatible’ or ‘Mais c’est vrai!’, occur more than once. Termed ‘code switching’ or diglossia in socio­ linguistics, this language phenomenon is a well known feature of Tunisian colloquial Arabic. And as it will clearly appear later in other productions by the Tunisian National Theatre, it is actually a shrewd technique of reinventing the playwriting form, recalling, among other things, Bertolt Brecht’s famous ‘social gestus’ to portray the status of his characters through their very behaviour and language. Owing to this, the world created by Mohamed Driss, the spirited and



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warmly comic ‘kingdom’ of Si Krim, the king of concrete (‘le roi du béton’) and Si Tenne, the king of the Tunisian quick lunch, (‘le roi du casse-croûte tunisien’), stands out as a parallel universe to the Tunisian one, utterly recognisable in all its clichés and banalities. Mohamed Driss started his theatrical career at home with Salut l’Instit, probably the first one-man show ever to be staged in Tunisia, but it is Aïchou Shakespeare which brought him fame and popularity. Prior to his appointment as head of the newly created Tunisian National Theatre, located in a former beylical palace in the heart of Tunis, he had set up a theatre group of his own called Le Théâtre Fou with some leading actors including Raja Ben Ammar, Moncef Sayem and Tawfiq Al Jibali. A few years later, the Ministry of Culture put at his disposal a theatre called ‘4e Art’ in the modern part of town. It is in this theatre that he put on his Othello or The One Day Star. As he told this author in an interview for the Tunisian daily La Presse de Tunisie in April 2007, his next Shakespearean adaptation will be King Lear.15 ‘Poets help us to love’, says the French writer Anatole France,16 yet in this time of discord, violence and threats, where the perception of difference is growing every day and individuals are rejecting dialogue more and more, one may wonder whether it is not in­congruous for a Tunisian Arab playwright to think about performing such a poet as Shakespeare. Mohamed Driss has his own answer to this question: I do claim the choice for universality. No matter what the origin; no matter what the culture; no matter what the faith; I have no problem. I adapted the Chinese Nobel laureate Gao Xingjian. I don’t think the fact of performing Shakespeare is a slight formalistic work, full of learning, an occasion for the director to show off his culture; it’s rather to shed light, to raise awareness.17

Of course, the stage cannot be an exact reflection of society, yet it is an expression of it, offering a possibly distorted image which can nevertheless serve as a basis for reflection and a useful source of information. Indeed, theatre may be viewed as the indirect critique of the period, from which valuable conclusions can be drawn. The three Tunisian directors who dared to adapt Shakespeare, that iconic Western literary figure, are endowed with a highly original sense of creativity and emancipation. Their respective works did not appear by chance. Rather, they were the bubbling up of an open minded, liberal undercurrent which is, in fact, increasingly evident in Tunisian life. A revealing, concrete example occurred in February 2007,

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when some uproar over the use of the French language erupted following the performance of a play, Art, written by a French author of Iranian origin, Yasmina Reza. It was performed in French, in the greatest playhouse of Tunis, Le Théâtre Municipal, by three famous names: Hichem Rostom, Raouf Ben Yaghlan and Mohamed Kouka, the director of Richard III (1984), Julius Caesar (1983) and Measure for Measure (1986). Rafik Darragi, a literary critic and novelist, holds a PhD in English from the Sorbonne-Paris IV. A former professor at the University of Tunis and director of the Bourguiba Institute of Modern Languages, he received the 1996 Tunisian National Education Award. He is an ISA executive member. He contributed the ‘Arab World’ entry to the Oxford Companion to Shakespeare (2001). His books include La Violence dans la tragédie jacobéenne (Tunis: University of Tunis Press, 1988), The Sword and the Mask (Tunis: Faculty of Letters, 1995), La Confession de Shakespeare (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2007) and Le Roman arabe moderne (Paris: Edilivre, 2017).

Notes 1. Faouzia Mezzi in La Presse de Tunisie, 15 March 2007. Available at . All the translations in this article are the author’s. 2. See Shirley Dent, ‘Interview: Sulayman Al-Basam’, available at (accessed 8 October 2007). ‘­Bardolatory is a term that refers to excessive adulation of William Shakespeare. The term derives from George Bernard Shaw’s coinage “Bardolator” of 1901’. Available at (accessed 4 October 2007). 3. Facsimile sent by Mohamed Kouka to the author on 8 May 2007. Available at and (accessed 29 June 2007). 4. Adbelhamid Gmati in La Presse de Tunisie, 17 August 1972. 5. ‘Shakespeare d’accord. Mais le théâtre tunisien? Mais le public tunisien? Et, en un mot, l’apport de Shakespeare dans la grandeur nature que Kouka tient à lui préserver, à la promotion, voire la vulgarisation du théâtre dans notre pays?’ Mohamed Messaoudi in La Presse de Tunisie, 2 August 1984. 6. ‘Richard III est une fable on ne peut plus actuelle-lumineuse sur les mécanismes de l’ambition, et sur la pratique politique à l’état pur où les seuls arguments opérationnels sont le meurtre, la liquidation physique et les procès fabriqués’ (Kouka, [fascimile]). 7. ‘L’usage de la religion comme argument politique pour séduire le bon peuple, m’a fait habiller les personnages de Richard III en Ayatollah’ (Ibid.).



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8. ‘Aujourd’hui, nous vivons un monde où sous couvert de sacré, un certain espoir “religieux” sérvit, pour détruire l’humain. Il faut revenir à Shakespeare pour tenter de comprendre et “réagir”’ (Ibid.). 9. Faouzia Mezzi in La Presse de Tunisie, 9 March 1992. 10. Iheb Al-Tounisi, ‘Mohamed Idriss’ Othello Deals With Issues of Integration and Racism’, available at (accessed 29 June 2007), quotes Driss as follows: ‘Othello touches on the issue of integration which is often discussed these days in electoral campaigns such the one taking place in France. Borders are closed to civilisations and cultures … [I]t has become hard to move around from one place to another. We find all these problems in this play. All these crimes which are inflicted on humanity leave us helpless: rejection of the other, the struggle between civilisations, and the dominant civilisation which now imposes its policy’. On Othello appropriation see Jonathan Burton, ‘“A Most Wily Bird”: Leo Africanus, Othello and the Trafficking in Difference’; and Michael Neill, ‘Post-colonial Shakespeare? Writing Away From the Centre’, both in Postcolonial Shakespeares, ed. Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin (London: Routledge, 2003), 43–63 and 164–85 respectively. See also Jyotsna Singh, ‘Othello’s Identity, Postcolonial Theory and Contemporary African Rewritings of Othello’, in Women, ‘Race’, and Writing in the Early Modern Period, ed. Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker (London: Routledge, 1994), 287–99. 11. ‘En un lieu entre l’instant et qui le précède. Après la passion et en deçà. / Avant l’acte et contre l’acte, des fantômes et des ombres … / Insomnie stratégique et désir prémédité … dans un espace narcissique et froid. / Jeu de rôles dans une tragédie que Shakespeare aurait écrite pour un autre spectateur … / Au fait, Shakespeare est-il réellement arabe?’ Available at > (accessed 29 June 2007). 12. Mezzi in La Presse de Tunisie, 15 March 2007. 13. ‘J’ai toujours apprécié le théâtre shakespearien. Shakespeare est un travail de maturité. Son théâtre montre un processus qui souligne le détail. Par conséquent, c’est faux de croire que dans Shakespeare il y a de la redondance. Il y a, par contre, une écriture à plusieurs niveaux.’ Rafik Darragi, ‘Interview de M. Driss’, La Presse de Tunisie, 14 May 2007. Available at (accessed 29 June 2007). 14. See Rafik Darragi, ‘Viva Shakespeare ou l’exercice des calembours’, La Presse de Tunisie, 6 July 1988. 15. Darragi, ‘Interview’. 16. Anatole France, Le Jardin d’Epicure (Paris: Coda, 2004), 46. 17. ‘j’ai le choix de l’universalité. Qu’importe l’origine? Qu’importe la culture? Qu’importe la foi? Je n’ai pas de problème; j’ai adapté l’écrivain chinois qui a eu le prix Nobel, Gao Xingjian. Je ne pense pas que le fait de travailler Shakespeare soit un travail un peu formaliste, bourré de culture, une occasion pour le metteur en scène de faire étalage de sa culture, c’est plutôt pour faire un éclairage, une prise de conscience.’ Darragi, ‘Interview’.

& Chapter 8

Beyond Colonial Tropes Two Productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Palestine Samer Al-Saber

Throughout my childhood and teenage years in the Middle East, I was exposed to the colonial construction of Shakespeare as ‘one of the best, if not “the best”, writer in the whole world’.1 The relationship between British imperialism and the construction of Shakespeare’s plays as civilizing literature is undeniable. As Emer O’Toole rightly notes in a wonderful Guardian rant on the 2012 World Shakespeare Festival: Shakespeare was a powerful tool of empire, transported to foreign climes along with the doctrine of European cultural superiority. Taught in schools and performed under the proscenium arches built where the British conquered, universal Shakespeare was both a beacon of the greatness of European civilisation and a gateway into that greatness – to know the bard was to be civilised.2

Notes for this section begin on page 168.



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In the process of decolonization, colonized artists and intellectuals have responded to the empire’s lofty rhetoric on Shakespeare in several ways, including echoing the colonists’ praise, resisting it and at times appropriating it.3 In my case, having read Macbeth, Hamlet and King Lear in Arabic long before I could compose a full sentence in English, I began by echoing imperialist messages but grew critical of the Shakespeare phenomenon over time. This article proceeds from the position of having come through imperial rhetoric and out again. It explores the relationship between Shakespeare and Palestine through two productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that both took place within educational institutions in Ramallah, in 1995 and 2011 respectively. In analysing these two productions sixteen years apart, I hope to show that the Shakespeare–Palestine relationship has outgrown some colonial binaries as Palestinian artists host, adapt, translate and produce Shakespearean plays.

Contextual Snapshots In his book The History of Palestinian Theatre, 1918–1948, pioneering playwright Nasri al-Jawzi states that modern theatre in Palestine was influenced by missionary schools that opened during the Ottoman and mandate periods but also by visiting companies from Syria and Egypt. In the early twentieth century, nationalistic Palestinian schools and colleges produced plays at the end of each academic year and during religious and national celebrations. However: While missionary schools celebrated their playwrights and authors such as Moliere, Racine, Corneille and Shakespeare in plays such as The Miser, School for Wives, Esther, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear and other plays, the national schools headed in the direction of reviving Arab heritage and drew their subjects from Arab history, to remind students of the glories of their nation and its blessed heroes.4

Written from exile about a period he experienced, al-Jawzi’s book serves as a biography of early Palestinian theatre in the early to mid-twentieth century. His statement serves several purposes. First, he mentions four plays by Shakespeare, demonstrating the heavy emphasis on the Bard’s oeuvre in missionary schools prior to 1948, especially in the period of the British mandate. Second, he expresses disdain for foreign playwrights, while elevating local Arab content as the highest form of theatrical production in educational institutions. He then suggests a distinction in the languages in which

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Shakespeare’s plays were presented: ‘we must admit that foreign and French troops visited the country and presented many plays by Shakespeare such as Hamlet and Macbeth … and that a great number of intellectuals took to reading these plays in the original languages’.5 The categories al-Jawzi identifies persist. First, the educated English-speaking elite encounter Shakespeare’s plays in English, as do students of English literature, who are assigned the plays in Palestinian universities. Second, the plays can be read in Arabic translations, readily available in libraries and bookstores and online. Third, they are staged in English and other European languages by visiting troupes. In 2012, for instance, Al-Kasaba Theatre hosted Thomas Ostermeier’s German-language production of Hamlet, which visited from the Schaubühne in Berlin,6 and in the autumn of 2015, Ashtar Theatre hosted Hamlet at the Ramallah Cultural Palace as part of the Globe Theatre’s ‘Globe-to-Globe’ tour.7 Fourth, Shakespeare’s plays are staged in educational institutions, including missionary schools, continuing the tradition of holiday and year-end performances.8 Finally, the plays are occasionally staged by professional troupes. For example, Al-Kasaba Theatre, in collaboration with West Jerusalem’s Khan Theatre, staged a bilingual Hebrew and Arabic-language production of Romeo and Juliet in 1996.9 In 2012, Ashtar Theatre staged Richard II for the Globe-to-Globe Festival in London in collaboration with Irish director Conall Morrison, also performing it in Palestine. Both Al-Kasaba and Ashtar have also staged Shakespeare plays as part of their student training programmes. Echoing al-Jawzi’s account, Ashtar’s artistic director Iman Aoun has remarked that historically, foreign schools, especially the ones that hired English language teachers, fostered the adoption of Shakespeare and drama in Palestinian curricula: ‘The French produced Molière and the Brits did Shakespeare. If the Greeks were here, they would probably have pushed for Sophocles’.10 Ashtar’s co-founder, Edward Muallem, further declared: ‘When Arabs began to develop their own curricula, they told the stories of Saladin’.11 In 2016, the Ashtar team’s testimony still corresponds to al-Jawzi’s account of Palestinian theatre of the early to mid-twentieth century. These separate accounts, emerging from past and contemporary theatrical practice, provide similar observations: missionary and private schools produce the works of Shakespeare, as do the recently developed theatre training initiatives.12 The continuing pattern makes it interesting to ask: how do contemporary productions of Shakespearean plays



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in Palestine, and specifically Ramallah, work to differentiate themselves from the so-called Universal Shakespeare and its history as an ideological tool of empire? The two Midsummer Night’s Dream productions I analyse – both Palestinian, though of course neither one can be taken as a comprehensive representation of Palestinian cultural life – took place in Ramallah for teaching purposes nearly two decades apart. These two productions suggest that the artists involved made conscious choices about how to use Shakespeare’s plays in education and as a forum for international collaborations. In the case of Ashtar’s 1995 production, Midsummer was not a vehicle to tell a Palestinian story through Shakespeare. On the contrary, Edward Muallem insisted: ‘It was a pedagogical project. We wanted the students to encounter Shakespeare’.13 Ashtar chose to stage the play and to collaborate with the Swiss Maralam Theatre to produce it. In the case of Al-Kasaba Drama Academy’s production, which I directed in 2011, the school did not select Midsummer; rather, the production was part of a Shakespeare festival hosted by its partner, Folkwang University in Essen, Germany. The academy’s subsequent productions of Shakespeare plays (Romeo and Juliet in 2013 and Much Ado About Nothing, anticipated in 2016) were also chosen as part of the same festival. For both Ashtar and Al-Kasaba, the experience of staging Midsummer sheds light on aspects of the ongoing connection between educational institutions and Shakespeare plays in Palestine.

1995: Ashtar’s Midsummer on Al-Siraj Stage In 1991, theatre artists Edward Muallem and Iman Aoun, former members of El-Hakawati theatre troupe, founded Ashtar for ­T heatre Productions and Training. Shortly thereafter, Ashtar established a partnership with Switzerland’s Maralam Theatre, which defined itself as a cultural project by and for refugees: MARALAM Theatre (Zurich), founded in 1984, is the first ongoing inter-cultural theatre company in Switzerland. MARALAM’s first productions were staged by exiled actors and actresses and one of their main themes was being a refugee in Switzerland. Migration, racism, loss of cultural identity, and living in multicultural societies are also themes that have become the signature of this company. MARALAM theatre has become a model for artists coming together from different cultural backgrounds. This theatre company is also active in schools and other educational institutions in Switzerland.14

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Maralam’s social justice mission aligned with Ashtar’s determination to train a generation of well-educated culture-makers. According to their agreement, co-founder, producer and artistic director Peter Braschler would visit Palestine twice a year to conduct acting workshops and direct a play at the end of each summer’s eight-week intensive theatre education programme.15 With the inauguration of this programme in the summer of 1992, the nascent theatre company had successfully established the first independent theatre training school for youth in Palestine. Before the end of the decade, they became a local producing house for professional theatre and a centre for training in the techniques of Theatre of the Oppressed.16 Ashtar’s student training functioned on three separate levels. First, students would participate in extra-curricular instruction for three years, which included their eight-week summer intensive. Advanced students would have access to an additional two-year programme. Second, the company trained schoolteachers to prepare them to become drama teachers within the Palestinian school system. Third, during each year’s summer production, the company trained a technical team to excel in various aspects of design and production. Within the first three years of partnership and development with Maralam, Braschler directed Beauty and the Beast (1993), Arnab Arnab… Do You Read Me?! (1994) and A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream (1995), all of which were staged at Ramallah’s Assiraj (also al-Siraj) Theatre.17 Midsummer (Illustration 8.1) was chosen because it provided fertile ground for training students, particularly through its accessible main plot of youth falling in love and running away from authority. The play addressed the emotional and personal struggles of teen­ agers, the age group (fourteen to eighteen) who made up the majority of the cast. As Iman Aoun told a Palestinian media outlet: … we took into consideration the psychological and physiological development of our students and their control over their muscles. The age of our students is the same as that of the characters in the play and, given their age, the themes and problems are very much the kind our students have on their minds.18

Dramaturg and translator Sameh Hijazi reads Shakespeare’s text as exploring the fine line between ‘dream and reality’ and the ‘nightmare and the beautiful dream’.19 Given Ashtar’s mission to train not only actors but future leaders, the play’s driving through-line provides ample opportunities to discuss the decisions of the char-



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Illustration 8.1. A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1995), courtesy of Ashtar Theatre.

acters, the context of the dream world, the politics of daily life and the consequences of errors in judgement. Although these struggles are not necessarily universal, they are relevant to Ashtar’s training programme. On the curricular level, Aoun explained that staging plays from the world repertoire inspires students to access a dynamic world heritage. Simultaneously, through the plot, Ashtar wished to raise the students’ awareness of the complexities of their interpersonal relationships. Aoun remembers asking: ‘How can teenagers access their emotional needs? Should they go along with these needs? Do they go with it or not?’20 Furthermore, the play’s sensual world challenged students to sense their own surroundings and question the limits and possibilities of their own personal relationships. The multiple layers of character analysis appealed to the teachers, students and professionals who participated in the production. Hijazi completed the translation from the original English, working closely with the director and also consulting two German translations.21 In collaboration with director Peter Braschler and artistic director Edward Muallem, he created a seventy-minute script infused with Arab motifs, but keeping the majority of the original names. He described the play as locally relevant due to its conflicting archetypal characters: a powerful authority, a magical dream world

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and a gritty underclass of workers. Similarly, he saw the characters as divided into emerging youth, political old guard and supernatural fairies. In the script, the old guard spoke in classical Arabic verse, whereas the youth spoke in Palestinian vernacular.22 Aoun explained that the local dialect assisted young actors as they approached the text in rehearsal, and in performance brought the audience closer to the story and its characters.23 Hijazi said his intercultural approach to the text was inspired by a Midsummer production he saw at the Mülheim festival in Germany in the late 1980s, during his dramaturgy studies. He recalled that the production took on an ethnic dimension and emphasized class distinctions by casting Middle Easterners as the Mechanicals. His own dramaturgical choices likewise highlighted class divisions among the characters. Although the production maintained the original plot, the text took on local colour through choices of language and vocabulary. But he insisted that the class divisions also reflected the Palestinian national condition, as students carried different identity documents based on their residence in Jerusalem or Ramallah, and their neighbouring villages. The cast also came from various strata of Palestinian society, which traditionally encompassed Christians and Muslims as well as the rich and the labouring class.24 The most significant localizing move was Hijazi’s replacement of the names Pyramus and Thisbe with the names of traditional Arab lovers Qays (Majnūn) and Layla.25 While Act 5 retained the comic motif of the Mechanicals’ repeated failure to perform their play, the shout-out to Arab heritage played a dual role, connecting the audience to the humour of Act 5 while simultaneously localizing the myth within the cultural world of the production’s Mechanicals. Although Ashtar’s characters, such as the tailor ‘Abu Khait’ (Mr Thread) and the tinker ‘Abu Nhaseh’ (Mr Copper), might lack access to Greek myths, they would surely know some poetry about the love story of Qays and his forbidden beloved Layla. These Palestinizing elements served to endear these characters to both the actors and the audience. ‘The language was quite similar to the original, but we put it in Palestinian shoes’, Aoun said.26 Hijazi’s version preserves the combination of verse and prose of the original text, but it foregoes the rigorously formulaic iambic pentameter of the verse in favour of end-rhymes and rich rhymes using homonyms.27 The labour-intensive task of rhyming the verse produces a text that is elevated, but in easily understood vernacular.



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For example, Titania’s ‘forgeries of jealousy’ speech tells the story of Oberon and Titania’s feud, as Oberon interjects and interrupts the activities of the fairies throughout the forest. In Shakespeare it begins: These are the forgeries of jealousy: And never, since the middle summer’s spring, Met we on hill, in dale, forest or mead, By paved fountain or by rushy brook, Or in the beached margent of the sea, To dance our ringlets to the whistling wind, But with thy brawls thou hast disturb’d our sport. (2.1.450–56)

Ashtar’s Titania states: .‫ هذه صور خيانة طلعتها الغيرة‬: ‫تيتانيا‬ ، ‫ ما التقينا و ال مرة فقيرة‬، ‫من اول الصيف‬ ، ‫ ال في الغابات و ال في البراري‬، ‫ال في السهل و ال في الوديان‬ ، ‫ال بجنب الينابيع و ال فوق الحصو بجنب السواقي‬ ‫و ال حتى ع رمل الشواطيء ع شان نرقص بحلقاتنا‬ !‫ع هدير الرياح من دون ما مخانقاتك تزعجنا‬

In the translation, Titania’s lines keep the spirit of the monologue as a picturesque rendering of the fairies’ dances in the forests, plains, valleys, wilds, springs and beach sands. The lines rhyme the following words: jealousy (ghīra) with rare (faqīra), wilds (barārī) with water wheel (sawāqī), dance circles (halaqātinā) with disturb us (tuz‘jinā). By contrast, the lines in Shakespeare do not rhyme, but keep to blank verse. The translation choice preserves the wild spirit of the speech, especially since the argument’s overall syntax remains similar. As in the original, the action verb ‘to disturb’ occurs at the end of the argument: ‘Thou hast disturb’d our sport’.28 In this production, Ashtar attempted to provide students with a text that conserves the plot, syntax, structure and patterns of the original text, because the school’s curriculum promised the experience of staging a play from the international canon. Artistic director Edward Muallem recalled: ‘the production was a training opportunity. Our goal was not to politicize the text, but to train acting and technical aspects of production’.29 Iman Aoun insisted that the students must be exposed to the classical repertoire, but maintained that the choice of play had to explore their own emotional struggles.30 Ashtar’s choice to stage the play in translation – however localized through the aforementioned use of language – rather than adapting it into an entirely Palestinian context, rendered the production as a medium

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of education, not a political statement. Muallem stated: ‘We let the play tell its story’.31 The production’s staging was both educational and experimental. From Beit Jala, the production team acquired four trees that they attached to casters and moved on stage to suit various scenes. French designer Phillip Andrieaux designed the lighting as part of a workshop with students. Acknowledging that trainees learn from watching as well as performing, the fifteen actors sat on stage during each performance. Each actor, dressed in a black base costume, kept token costume pieces and props underneath their chairs. Whenever a scene began, the actors stood and set up the stage as the play unfolded before the audience. Playing at Assiraj Stage (also known as Assiraj Cinema) in downtown Ramallah, the show had the recognizable aesthetic of a travelling company of actors: minimal technical elements, a black box aesthetic, visible offstage performers, a sloped audience and open wing space.

2011: Al-Kasaba Theatre Academy When I arrived in Ramallah in August 2011, the teaching team at the Drama Academy and visiting faculty from Folkwang University were conducting auditions and workshops for the entering class of 2011–12. I interviewed faculty from both campuses in order to understand the purposes of the production and the curricular expectations of the second- and third-year student participants.32 I conducted an interview with Folkwang University’s vice president for international affairs, Hans Schmidt, who recalled that the partnership with Al-Kasaba to establish a B.A. programme in theatre began as an individual volunteer effort by various Department of Theatre faculty, who believed in the necessity of creating exchange programmes with Israel/Palestine.33 Volkmar Claus, a retired artistic director from Berlin, had long been interested in the region and, after the Oslo peace accords in 1993, began to build relationships in the Palestinian theatre community. When he met George Ibrahim of Al-Kasaba Theatre, he found a suitable partner:34 Ibrahim had been producing theatre in Jerusalem since 1970. In 2001, Al-Kasaba opened a new branch in Ramallah in the old Assiraj Cinema, in the heart of the city.35 By 2007, Ibrahim and Claus had created the basic framework of the partnership to create a drama academy in Ramallah. In 2008, the German partners acquired funding through



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the ‘Future of Palestine’ initiative at the German Mercator Foundation, which provided 300,000 euros of funding over three years.36 Folkwang has subsequently renewed its commitment until 2018.37 In 2009, Al-Kasaba Drama Academy opened its doors to the inaugural cohort at the first acting conservatory in Palestine. After a three-year period of training in voice, movement, textual analysis and theatre history, Al-Kasaba graduates students with a bachelor’s degree in theatre. The degree bears the name of Folkwang University along with Al-Kasaba Academy. Although graduating students in Germany and Palestine technically hold the same degree, the German partners saw fundamental differences between their students due to the socio-political conditions in Palestine. In auditions, Palestinian and German faculty found that Palestinian students often struggled with social and familial objections to the theatrical profession. Schmidt recalled differences in the audition process: ‘It is not like in Germany, “He will be a good actor!” Here it is more about personality, communication, personal background, and we try to get as much information as possible. Is the person coming from a poor family in the countryside or [from] Haifa? So there are many aspects’.38 The programme’s academic goals reflect its political context. The faculty seeks students who wish to effect social change and impact Palestinian society in ways valued by Folkwang University. Matters of artistic freedom, gender equality, social responsibility and Western modernity held the greatest priority. From the beginning, the project emphasized the necessity of German–Palestinian interactions that would support social transformation through the theatrical profession on the one hand, and personal relationships among student and faculty participants on the other. This exchange would enrich German students as well. Schmidt stated: For us, if becoming an actor means so much for people here, I have to think about my own life. And the other way around: to see what it means to live in a more or less totally free country; and to see what it means to fall in love and you don’t have to justify yourself … That’s what the students see in Germany. Then you come to different conclusions. For us, it means a social reality, which is totally opposite to us.39

Folkwang faculty and students had learned during Palestinian students’ previous visit to Essen that the latter appreciated basic freedoms taken for granted in Germany, such as the ability to drive

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for several hours without seeing a checkpoint, or the ability to travel long distances within Germany without having to carry identity cards. Conversely, on their visit to Palestine, German students were shocked at the limitations of Palestinian everyday life, such as the inability to travel freely or the need to adapt to local norms such as modest behaviour or dress. Most importantly, German students witnessed the extent of the personal sacrifice that Palestinians endured in order to study and produce theatre. Productions of Shakespeare plays form a foundation of the student and faculty interactions between Al-Kasaba and Folkwang. Folkwang regularly holds an international Shakespeare festival, which functions as a platform for international exchange with partner universities.40 For example, in 2011, the festival hosted five productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream; these came from Al-Kasaba Academy, Columbia University (USA), Shanghai Theatre Academy, Romania’s Lucia Blaga University and Folkwang itself. Over a period of two weeks, the participants performed their own productions. The festival culminated in a joint production combining seventy actors, five production styles, five languages and the contribution of directors, dramaturgs and choreographers from all participating universities.41

Illustration 8.2. A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2011), courtesy of Al-Kasaba Drama Academy and Folkwang University.



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To share in this undertaking, we began rehearsals on A Midsummer Night’s Dream in late August 2011. In the early stages of rehearsals, dramaturg Hans Schmidt (also Folkwang’s vice president for international affairs) presented the cast with his research on the play. The director of the German production, Brian Michaels, explained his editorial choices about what to include and what to cut in the common text of the play; all participating universities adopted the common text. The presentation emphasized the power struggle between characters, particularly the pervasive theme of eroticism in the play. Reviewing these materials makes clear the vast distance between Palestinian realities and Shakespeare’s Green World:42 the German faculty members’ rational analysis of the text situated it within the usual ideas of teenage love, erotic fantasy and female heroines. While I recognized the scholarly, artistic, and historical merits of this vision, I also saw that the absence of a robust critique of Shakespeare’s work being used as part of a British imperialist project presented an opportunity for our production to look for an alternative, consciously postcolonial approach to producing it in Palestine. George Ibrahim, the general director of Al-Kasaba Theatre, translated the common text Brian Michaels had edited.43 Ibrahim’s text remained faithful to the Folkwang-approved version, which was primarily driven by plot and by the festival’s requirement that the performance clock in under an hour. Ibrahim rendered the text entirely into Palestinian vernacular and infused touches of traditional local humour. For example, when Titania declares her love for a donkey, Ibrahim’s choices of rhythms and vocabulary appealed to the humour of the Palestinian street. Similarly, his text illuminated the plot through a language commonly used for fairy tales and Palestinian children’s theatre, which Ibrahim had excelled at producing since the 1970s.44 The translation and editing left us with a text whose humour was based primarily on situational comedy, which prompted a directorial question: in the context of an international festival, what does a Palestinian company of actors bring to the table? This consideration prompted my direction for the play. In the programme notes, I described the sources of inspiration, the rehearsal process and the directorial concept of this Palestinian Shakespeare product: Shakespeare’s work is not universal. If he were alive today, he would be proud to hear that his play is being performed in Palestine, the holy land.

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In our version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, we aren’t as interested in Shakespeare’s 16th century and its text as much as we are enamored with the process of building this play from our own stance and moment. Denial is not allowed. We ask real questions: If the starting point for this production were a group of Palestinian acting students in a nation under occupation, what might the production look like? How do the restrictions of the minimal requirements of a festival, the foreign names and ideas in the story, the conceptually Western play text and the harsh realities of Palestine intersect on the stage in front of the audience? Should we stop ourselves from being lost in the fantasy or must we embrace it? Our starting point is the act of building. As Palestine and its youth constantly struggle to rebuild this nation, our acting company struggled to make and perform this play. We started from the mess: An ugly apartheid wall, epistemological destruction, psychological damage, and social disintegration. From mess, confusion, rubble, and forced illusion, we built. If Shakespeare were to see our play, he would recognize the names of his characters and places, the sequence of his scenes, and the general motif of his green world, but he may not recognize the mixed color of our skin, the tone of our language, our sense of humor, and the direction of our imagination. From the Western Shakespeare, we recognized our estrangement. From the violence, we found laughter. From Palestine, our starting point, we launched into self-discovery and revelation.45

In the early stages of rehearsals, the context of Palestinian everyday life (the outside) clashed with the given circumstances of Al-­ Kasaba Academy within the theatre building (the inside), causing a constant need to readjust expectations. Outside, the actors lived the occupation’s difficult realities: political uncertainty, limited freedom of movement, financial duress, familial opposition to theatre education, societal pressures, government dysfunction and an overall irrational existence. Inside, they experienced admirable, albeit limited, attempts at personal and professional liberation: daily physical exercises in voice and movement, open discussions on issues of equality, creative self-explorations, freedom of interpersonal relationships and studies of foreign plays and aesthetics. The outside/inside tension often appeared in the form of unhealthy competition among the actors, and individuals’ attempts to assert their artistic and personal identity within the building. In addition, the daily grind pervaded the thought process and behaviours of the



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cast, evident through absences, lack of punctuality and unease with the director’s authority in rehearsal. In the quest for a Palestinian rendition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, we began rehearsals with company-building exercises and established periods of open discussion and a culture of democratic conflict resolution. I relinquished patriarchal control in favour of collective decision-making.46 As the actors – three women and eleven men – discovered their own place within the company, they began a series of improvisations emphasizing personal stories and images of everyday life. For example, in an exercise called ‘Palestinian Moments’, the actors created a series of frozen tableaux from the Palestinian streets. These moments became the foundation for the characters of the Mechanicals and artisans in the play. To build up an archive of source work, they researched and brought potential character props and took photographs representing various locations and characters in the play. They also built an archive of musical tracks for the characters. The rehearsals transformed from a traditionally hierarchical process to a decolonized democratic creative space, where the company had equal creative sway over rehearsal outcomes. During this period of company building, the actors demonstrated interest and understanding of specific characters, which became their assigned roles in the final production. The actors cast themselves, and in one instance, two actors, playing Demetrius and Peter Quince, decided to exchange roles. I supported their decision. The rehearsal process proceeded from a state of chaos and disarray to a production concept that emerged from the actors’ understanding of the play and their Palestinian locale. For example, Ibrahim Mozain, director of the academy at that time, suggested that ropes would be useful props for building abstract trees. When technical director Moaz al-Ju’beh set up the ropes on stage, the actors creatively worked with them like a group of circus performers. Based on this rehearsal, we arranged the ropes in what became the set of the play. In another rehearsal, the actors raided Al-Kasaba Theatre’s costume closets to research potential costumes for their characters. They continued to experiment with various costumes for several weeks until they settled on their final choices, which became their performance costumes. Similarly, whenever an actor felt the need to use a prop, he or she brought it to rehearsal. In a meeting with the technical director, the actors suggested images that inspired the final

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lighting design choices. Eventually, the unstructured atmosphere of rehearsals led to a company-led design. From 22 August to 22 October 2011, rehearsals occurred between 9 am and 6 pm, five days a week. On occasion, special rehearsals took place on weekends and coaching sessions on weekdays after 6 pm. A full rehearsal day contained three simultaneous rehearsals at all times: one with the director, one with the assistant director and movement coach Petra Barghouthi, and one scene rehearsal without an authority figure. Special weekend or evening rehearsals included dance choreography with Petra Barghouthi as well, and a site-specific rehearsal to run the play in a nearby forest. Throughout the process, there was tension between the actors’ need for finalized scenes and their freedom to make new choices on a daily basis. As the first preview performance approached, I gave extensive notes at the end of each run and the play began to take shape. The aesthetic of the final production was hybrid: a mixture of the inescapable English origins of the play, Palestinian moments, a Shakespearean plot, found objects and the bodies of Palestinian youth constantly between the ‘outside’ occupation and the ‘inside’ freedoms within the Academy. For example, before the play began, the ensemble of actors appeared on stage, as themselves: preparing for the performance, collecting their props and dressing up in their costumes. The Mechanicals, figures for Palestinian labourers, set up the first scene as if they were staging A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the Palestinian audience. Egeus opened the play in a traditional patriarchal costume, wearing a black abaya (robe) and forcing his daughter to marry Demetrius, who dressed in modern pants and shirt. The Mechanicals spoke in street vernacular and behaved like Palestinian tradesmen, based on the actors’ research in nearby markets in Ramallah and their own experience as children of working class families. Trees made of suspended ropes functioned as swings, seats and climbing ropes. The fairies had no identifiable local characteristics, nor did Puck, but in the initial meeting of Oberon and Titania, her red-clad fairies and his black-clad followers simulated a civil war in a dance choreographed by Barghouthi.47 In Act 5, the Mechanicals also alluded to local politics when Tom Snout played the Wall wearing a jalābiyya printed with the image of the Israeli Wall near the ­Qalandiya checkpoint. In keeping with the Palestinian spirit, a dabka dance closed the play’s final wedding celebration.



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The context of Al-Kasaba’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream lent itself to a combined approach of ensemble building, improvisation and traditional staging techniques. The Shakespearean source text permitted untraditional approaches in rehearsal because of the long tradition of adaptation, editing and co-optation that had been established on the Western stage and emulated on world stages. Had the text been based on the work of a modern Arab playwright such as Sa‘dallah Wannous or Alfred Farag, the margin for circumventing or subverting the text would have been narrower. While such adaptations of Arab plays do take place in Palestine, Shakespeare continues to be used openly as a common open source text that is adhered to or entirely transformed based on the needs of the production. In addition, the simultaneous reverence for and desire to localize the original text inspired the actors to draw on personal experiences in their character development. Perhaps it is as O’Toole says: ‘What’s interesting about Shakespeare isn’t Shakespeare at all – it’s the themes and innovations that theatre artists bring to the texts’.48

Conclusion In describing an era of direct colonialism and its consequences, Loomba and Orkin remark: ‘Colonial masters imposed their value system through Shakespeare, and in response colonized peoples often answered back in Shakespearean accents’.49 But to characterize these two recent productions and the numerous Shakespeare plays produced by schools and theatres like Ashtar and Al-Kasaba as predetermined by a colonial legacy would be ingenuous and simplistic, because these schools and the artists involved have demonstrated artistic agency in the choices within and around the production process. The reasons to engage with Shakespearean texts far exceed the impositions of the civilizing missions of the past. In neither case was Midsummer chosen, rehearsed and performed as a vehicle for writing back to the empire, nor as an ideological export from an overbearing colonial master. Nonetheless, despite and because of the aforementioned connection to missionary schools and through the British Empire’s occupation of the region, the Bard remains one of the most recognizable playwrights in Palestine. His plays are familiar, if not by content then by title, and well regarded as both theatre and literature. The ability to produce them on the Palestinian stage suggests to the

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viewing public that a troupe possesses a high degree of intercultural awareness and technical competence. In the absence of canonical translations, local artists have taken on the challenge of both translating and adapting the plays into Palestinian dialect, which they have produced successfully. On a financial and administrative level, Shakespeare’s plays have become a forum for collaboration between Palestinian theatre artists/schools and international partners such as Folkwang University and Maralam Theatre, particularly as part of theatre training programmes. Although the contexts of these two productions and their producing schools differed in many respects, they similarly exploited Midsummer as part of their educational programming, seizing the opportunity for these collaborations. The two productions used their present realities as the basis for their final product: minimal sets, lighting and costumes, student actors, Palestinian vernacular and local elements to mediate the text. In both productions, the student actors appeared as themselves on stage, suggesting to the audience that local capacity building takes precedence over a faithful rendition of Shakespeare’s play. In speech, characterization, situational humour and cultural spirit, the actors played the Mechanicals and artisans as local labourers who closely resembled a commonly recognized working-class Palestinian identity. The productions also consciously preserved the Shakespearean storyline, and to a great degree the dramaturgy, translation and directorial concept maintained recognizable elements of the play.50 Claiming that a Shakespeare production in Palestine simply re­ inforces a history of colonialism undermines the agency of the artists. Certainly, tension may arise as directors or instructors attempt to emphasize Palestinian culture and heritage while simultaneously preparing students to produce plays from the international repertoire. However, in my own attempt at a resistant reading of the play and in my emphasis on exposing the actors to the construction of the Shakespearean text, I found a vast space for interpretation and creative instruction. In my study of the Ashtar production and in my conversations about it with Edward Muallem, Iman Aoun and Sameh Hijazi, I have noted a similar critical distance and intellectual dexterity. In sum, while I would not seek to deny the roots of the Shakespeare phenomenon in the impositions of British imperialism, I have also become more cognizant that training, collaboration and exposure to the international canon are among many valid ­reasons



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to engage with the Bard in Palestine, whether in schools or on public stages. And yet I can’t help but ponder the merits and ironies in Palestinian productions of a play in which Wall ‘away doth go’ and Puck declares by the end of the performance that ‘all is mended’. Samer Al-Saber is an assistant professor of theater and performance studies at Stanford University. He holds a Ph.D. in theatre history, theory and criticism from the University of Washington and held a two-year Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Davidson College from 2013 to 2015. His teaching, practice and scholarship focus on the intersection of cultural production and political conflict in the Middle East.

Notes I would like to thank Iman Aoun, Petra Barghouthi, Volkmar Claus, Lina Ghanem, Katherine Hennessey, Sameh Hijazi, George Ibrahim, Margaret Litvin, Edward Muallem, Hala Nassar, Beesan Ramadan, Hans Schmidt and the cast of Al-Kasaba’s Midsummer (2011) for their support and assistance in carrying out this project. 1. Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin, eds., Post-Colonial Shakespeares (Florence, US: Routledge, 2003), 1. 2. Emer O’Toole, ‘Shakespeare, Universal? No, It’s Cultural Imperialism’, The Guardian, 21 May 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/ may/21/shakespeare-universal-cultural-imperialism (accessed 14 July 2016). 3. See Loomba and Orkin, Post-Colonial Shakespeares, ‘Introduction’, 1–22. 4. Naṣrī Al-Jawzī, Tārīkh Al-Masraḥ Al-Filasṭīnī, 1918–1948 (Nīqūsiyā, Qubruṣ: Sharq Briss, 1990), 14. Unless otherwise stated, all translations from Arabic are mine. 5. Al-Jawzī, Tārīkh, 17. 6. C.f. http://www.schaubuehne.de/en/productions/hamlet.html (accessed 14 July 2016). 7. C.f. http://globetoglobe.shakespearesglobe.com/hamlet/the-map/north-asia/ palestine?date=02+Apr+2014 (accessed 14 July 2016). 8. Emile Ashrawi, personal interview, 11 January 2011, Ramallah. Ashrawi recalled the occurrence of such productions when he was a student in Jerusalem in the 1960s. He referred to the end of year productions as part of his yearly extra-­ curricular activities. 9. See 30 Years: Al-Kasaba Theatre 1970–2000 (Ramallah: Al-Kasaba Theatre, 2000) and George Ibrahim, ‘Lysistrata’, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 28, no. 2 (2006): 34–36. 10. Iman Aoun, personal interview, 1 June 2016, Ashtar Theatre, Ramallah. 11. Edward Muallem, personal interview, 1 June 2016, Ashtar Theatre, Ramallah.

170 Samer Al-Saber 12. For a similar account of Shakespeare’s legacy in educational institutions (particularly in missionary schools) in Africa, see David Johnson, ‘From the Colonial to the Postcolonial. Shakespeare and Education in Africa’, in Loomba and Orkin, Post-Colonial Shakespeares, 218–34. 13. Ibid. 14. Beauty and the Beast performance programme (Ramallah: Ashtar Theatre, 1994). In Arabic. 15. Edward Muallem, personal interview, 26 October 2010, Ramallah. 16. Rania Jawad, ‘Ashtar’s Forum Theatre: Writing History in Palestine’, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 23, no. 1 (2008): 115–30. 17. ‘The Training Program’, in Ashtar: A Blazing Stage (Ramallah: Ashtar Theatre, 2005), second printing, 18–26. 18. Quoted in Rana Anani’s ‘Adroit Rendering of a Shakespearean Classic’, Jerusalem Times, 25 August 1995, 13. 19. Quoted in ‘A Shakespearian Meal on Palestinian Fire: Ashtar School’s Students Dream of a Summer Night in Ramallah’, Kul Al-‘Arāb, 25 August 1995. In Arabic. 20. Iman Aoun, personal interview, 1 June 2016. 21. No colloquial Arabic translation existed. Working together from English (rather than adapting an existing literary Arabic [fuṣḥā] translation) allowed Braschler to be involved in the process. 22. Sameh Hijazi, personal interview, 15 May 2016, Bethlehem. 23. Quoted in Jerusalem Times, 25 August 1995. 24. Sameh Hijazi, personal interview, 15 May 2016. 25. Anani, ‘Adroit Rendering of Shakespearean Classic’. Dating from pre-Islamic oral poetry, the legend of Qays ibn al-Mulawwaḥ (known as ‘al-Majnūn’, The Madman) and his beloved Layla has inspired artworks ranging from Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi’s The Quintet to Eric Clapton’s ‘Layla’. 26. Iman Aoun, personal interview, 1 June 2016. 27. In English, the words won and one would be an example of a rich rhyme. 28. William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 75. 29. Edward Muallem, personal interview, 1 June 2016. 30. Iman Aoun, personal interview, 1 June 2016. 31. Edward Muallem, personal interview, 1 June 2016. 32. For an alternative critical perspective on this production, see Rand Hazou, ‘Dreaming of Shakespeare in Palestine’, Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 20, no. 2: 139–54, 2015 33. Hans Schmidt, personal interview, 25 August 2011, Ramallah. 34. Volkmar Claus, personal interview, 26 August 2011, Ramallah. 35. George Ibrahim, personal interview, 8 January 2011, Ramallah. 36. See http://www.folkwang-uni.de/en/home/theater/intl-cooperations/­dramaacademy-ramallah/ (accessed 1 June 2016). 37. George Ibrahim, personal conversation, 24 May 2016, Ramallah. 38. Hans Schmidt, personal interview, 25 August 2011. 39. Ibid.



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40. The Al-Kasaba Drama Academy participated in the festival in 2011 and 2013. For more information on the history of Folkwang’s international partnerships through this format, see http://www.folkwang-uni.de/en/home/theater/coursesof-studies/acting/shakespeare-projects/ (accessed 15 July 2016). 41. Folkwang University continues to host a Shakespeare festival regularly. Al-Kasaba participated with Romeo and Juliet in 2013 and Much Ado About Nothing in 2016. 42. Northrop Frye coined the term ‘Green World’ in The Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957) to describe a place of escape, typically a forest, in Shakespearean comedies. 43. He consulted but did not end up using an existing fuṣḥā translation, finding it easier to work from the English. 44. On George Ibrahim’s work, see Chapter 5 of my ‘Permission to Perform: Palestinian Theatre in Jerusalem, 1967–1993’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Washington, 2013). 45. Samer al-Saber, ‘Director’s Notes’, A Midsummer Night’s Dream production programme (Ramallah: Al-Kasaba Theatre, 2011). 46. Early in the rehearsal process, the actors agreed to make decisions as a company; subsequently, they voted on issues as they arose. Some of these decisions influenced production design. 47. While the production did not declare the significance of the colours, the warring factions could have suggested to some audience members a reference to division within the Palestinian authority. According to Iman Aoun, a recent production by Ashtar in Gaza explicitly represented the Fateh/Hamas division in the conflict between Oberon and Titania. 48. O’Toole, ‘Shakespeare, Universal?’ 49. Loomba and Orkin, Post-Colonial Shakespeares, 2. 50. Hazou addresses some of the tensions that arose in my own attempt to both Palestinize the text and maintain its core theme and plot. See ‘Dreaming of Shakespeare in Palestine’, cited above.

& Chapter 9

Bringing Lebanon’s Civil War Home to Anglophone Literature Alameddine’s Appropriation of Shakespeare’s Tragedies Yousef Awad

Introduction Ripped apart by civil war and continual political and military interventions by regional and international powers, Lebanon is an ‘unstated state [… that] has no strength and no authority’, as literary scholar Salah D. Hassan laments. Statements regarding Lebanon’s fifteen-year civil war ‘are unheard, muffled in the chambers of power politics and world affairs, where effective statements must be backed by force, a force that Lebanon does not possess’.1 In the face of this incapacity for effective political expression, Rabih Alameddine, a Lebanese novelist who resides in the US, has chosen fiction laced with allusions to Shakespearean tragedy as a vehicle through which to recount the horrors of the Lebanese civil war. Two of his novels in Notes for this section begin on page 186.



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particular – I, The Divine (2001) and An Unnecessary Woman (2013)2 – provide his protagonists a platform from which to recount the other­ wise inexpressible fears, apprehensions and anxieties they have experienced as a consequence of the conflict. This article explores the ways in which, in these two novels, Alameddine draws attention to Shakespeare’s representation of traumatic events in Macbeth and King Lear and links it to his own depiction of his nation’s tragic domestic strife. I argue that Shakespeare’s tragedies offer Alameddine a viable frame to narrate the horrors of Lebanon’s civil war. The tragedies are universally disseminated and read and, in Dieter Mehl’s phrase, they ‘presen[t] extremes of human suffering and cruelty’.3 In both Macbeth and King Lear, civil war is a recurring theme that haunts the characters and governs their thoughts and actions. As civil war rages in the wake of Macbeth’s decision to murder King Duncan, characters lament the resultant death and destruction; Malcolm highlights the fact that Scotland ‘sinks beneath the yoke; / It weeps, it bleeds, and each new day a gash / Is added to her wounds’ (4.3.39–41).4 Macduff calls Scotland a ‘nation miserable’ ruled by ‘an untitled tyrant bloody-sceptred’ (4.3.103–5). Likewise, for Ross, Scotland ‘cannot / Be called our mother, but our grave’ where ‘[t]he deadman’s knell / Is there scarce asked for who, and good men’s lives / Expire before the flowers in their caps, / Dying or ere they sicken’ (4.3.166–74). As Mehl convincingly argues, the image of blood sticking to Macbeth’s hands shows that ‘Macbeth’s guilt is no longer a matter of his personal tragic experience, but a public affair that set armies in motion and affected the whole nation’.5 The sense of futility caused by a civil war and its concomitant violence is also clear in King Lear. By dividing the kingdom, Lear ‘rupture[s] the bond between the monarch and his people’,6 triggering a civil war, as hinted at in the start of Act II, when Curan asks Edmund if he has ‘heard of no likely wars toward ’twixt the two dukes of Cornwall and Albany’ (2.1.6–14). This hint becomes reality when Kent confirms that there is a division between the two dukes and that French soldiers have landed on British shores (3.1.18–38). In each of these two plays, Shakespeare depicts a nation that suffers from civil war and thus is vulnerable to foreign invasion. Shakespeare permeates Alameddine’s works and shapes his themes. Alameddine asserts that he ‘conscious[ly]’ draws on Shakespeare’s works: ‘I reference Shakespeare in every book. I fell

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in love while in school in Lebanon’.7 As an Arab author in diaspora, Alameddine draws on both canonical Western texts and Arab cultural heritage to depict the experiences of his characters, who usually live between cultures. Alameddine’s identity as an Arab American, with a hyphenated identity and influences from two cultures, plays a pivotal role in repeating – with variations – ideas and themes that have been previously dramatized by Shakespeare. Alameddine’s novels, to quote Syrine Hout’s words on the works of Arab writers in diaspora, ‘focus on the experiences of war and exile from the vantage point of another country’, and therefore these novels are part of a ‘trans­national body of diasporic literature, characterized by their affiliation with Lebanon as a continuous source of artistic inspiration’.8 One way to comprehend the mental and psychological agonies and pains of Alameddine’s female protagonists, like Aaliya Saleh in An Unnecessary Woman (2013) and Sarah Nour El-Din in I, The Divine (2001), is to compare them to Lady Macbeth and Cordelia, whose lives are greatly influenced by civil wars in which they actively participate. To borrow the words of Graham Holderness on Arabic adaptations of Shakespeare, Alameddine’s two novels ‘appeal both to those interested in Shakespeare, and to those concerned with political and cultural events in the Arab world’.9 In other words, by appropriating Shakespeare’s works, Alameddine joins two discrepant and differing worldviews. The fictional space Alameddine presents is thematically and aesthetically hybridized and offers the Western reader – since the two novels are written in English – an opportunity to understand the traumatic experiences the protagonists undergo during Lebanon’s civil war through a more familiar Shakespearean framework and context. Among their other achievements, Alameddine’s works provide ‘insights into everyday lived experience in a war-torn city’, as Jumana Bayeh states.10 Similarly, Wail S. Hassan describes Alameddine’s works as ‘brilliant experiments in story-telling that contemplate the physical and psychological damages of war’.11 Bayeh and Hassan show how Lebanon’s civil war leaves unhealable scars on ­Alameddine’s characters, yet neither of them analyses how ­Alameddine draws on Shakespeare to portray the war’s chaos, turmoil and disorder. Attending to these intertextual moments helps shift the focus from thematic readings of Alameddine’s work to appreciation of the artistic strategies he chooses to employ.



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‘Unsex me here’: An Unnecessary Woman and Macbeth An Unnecessary Woman paints a portrait of an isolated woman as she comes to grips with getting old. Aaliya Saleh is a seventy-two-yearold Lebanese woman who works at a bookshop in Beirut. Over fifty years, she has translated thirty-seven books into Arabic, but none of her translations has been read by anyone else: once a translation is completed, Aaliya stores the manuscript in a box in the maid’s room or bathroom of her apartment. A childless divorcée, Aaliya has never left Beirut, where she has endured the lunacy of the civil war and its aftermath. She is estranged from her family and lives as a recluse in her apartment, in a building shared with three women whom she calls ‘the three witches’. This reference to the Weird Sisters is one of An Unnecessary Woman’s numerous direct quotations from Macbeth, possibly the most central of the book’s myriad intertexts. At the start of the novel, Aaliya comments that when her husband of four years filed for divorce, ‘Nothing in our marriage became him like leaving it’ (13), echoing Malcolm’s line to Duncan regarding the execution of the treacherous Thane of Cawdor: ‘nothing in his life / Became him like the leaving it’ (1.4.2–11). Aaliya quotes Macbeth’s ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace’ (161) after she meditates on the futility of her life (159). She also chants the witches’ famous line from Act 4, Scene 1, when her apartment building’s radiators are turned on: ‘Double, double, toil and trouble. One of them must have shivered, probably Marie-Therese’ (156). But Alameddine’s borrowings from Shakespeare are not limited to direct quotations. They include adaptations of particular scenes or appropriations of Shakespearean themes, explicitly alluding to or carrying traces of Shakespeare’s plays. Alameddine models Aaliya after Lady Macbeth, using both direct and indirect references. Just as Shakespeare reveals Lady Macbeth’s hopes, aspirations and anxieties through soliloquies,12 in Alameddine’s homodiegetic narrative Aaliya speaks directly to the reader, expressing her thoughts and opinions without intermediaries. The famous scene in which Lady Macbeth persistently tries to remove the blood from her hands finds an analogue in Aaliya’s response to divorce – ‘I cleaned and scrubbed and mopped and disinfected until no trace of him remained, no scent, not a single hair, not a touch’ (13) – and in her annual New Year’s Day ritual, in which she ‘begin[s] the morning with a ceremonial

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bath, a rite of scrubbing and cleansing’ (6). Both women are childless, and Aaliya’s distaste – ‘I’ll admit that I’m not fond of children. They stick to you like burrs and tearing them off is cumbersome’ (179) – echoes Lady Macbeth’s expression of readiness to kill her own child, also with an image of tearing (‘… I would, while it was smiling in my face, / Have pluck’d my nipple from his boneless gums, / And dash’d the brains out …’ [1.7.56–58]). In Shakespeare’s play, the intimate relationship between Lady Macbeth and her husband comes under pressure as Lady Macbeth encourages her husband to brush aside his cowardly fears and murder Duncan: … Wouldst thou have that Which thou esteem’st the ornament of life, And live a coward in thine own esteem, Letting ‘I dare not’ wait upon ‘I would’ … ? (1.7.35–43)

Similarly, in An Unnecessary Woman, Aaliya refers to her husband as a ‘fool’, ‘imbecile’, ‘impotent’ and ‘coward’ (204), highlighting his unmanliness and his inability to take a decision, no matter how insignificant. But just as, after murdering Duncan, Macbeth eventually marginalizes his wife, making his decisions without her input, after the divorce Aaliya is unneeded, ‘unnecessary’, as the title of the novel suggests, ‘[her] family’s appendix, its unnecessary appendage’ (13). Both Lady Macbeth and Aaliya are insomniac: Lady Macbeth sleepwalks, while wearing her nightgown and holding a candle, by the light of which she writes a note on a piece of paper and reads it (5.1.3–6). Aaliya confesses that in her sixties, she began having sleeping problems (241), and later tells the reader, ‘I must try to sleep tonight. I must’ (260). Elsewhere, she states: ‘I am unable to sleep. Tumbling thoughts of why, how, and what occupy my mind’ (115), words that carry traces of Macbeth’s ‘O, full of scorpions is my mind’ (3.2.36). Upon waking, Aaliya moves around mechanically, emphasized by Alameddine’s use of the simple present to describe her actions: I raise myself out of bed rather quickly, hoping to banish the worries from the mists of my head. … I put on my robe. My nightgown, darkened with moisture, sticks to my torso like the skin of an onion. … I walk myself back to my bedroom, back to the stack of books on my mirrorless vanity, unread books that I intend to read, a large stack. (115, emphasis added)



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This scene is repeated nearly verbatim later in the novel (261–62), the street lamp emitting weak light and Aaliya wearing her nightgown as she thinks about reading. Further, as the novel opens, Aaliya notes that on the first of January of every year, she ‘light[s] two candles for Walter Benjamin’ (6). A few pages later, she recalls, ‘I was reading the book [Calvino’s Invisible Cities] by candlelight while people killed each other outside my window’ (26). The latter image is particularly reminiscent of Lady Macbeth, sleepwalking with a candle in hand, while people are being murdered outside her castle as a result of Macbeth’s usurpation of Duncan’s throne. These direct allusions give grounds for searching out broader thematic parallels as well. In the novel, as in Macbeth, a knock on the door portends or symbolizes violent events. Immediately after murdering Duncan, Macbeth hears a knock on the door: ‘Whence is that knocking? / How is’t with me, when every noise appals me?’ (2.2.60–61). Macbeth voices his fears and anxieties thus: ‘Wake Duncan with thy knocking. I would thou couldst’ (2.2.77), and the porter elaborately comments on the knocking at the door before he eventually opens the gates for Macduff and Lennox (2.3.1–17). In An Unnecessary Woman, Aaliya’s half-brother, the eldest, rings the doorbell incessantly and ominously to herald the appearance of Aaliya’s aging mother along with her luggage: ‘He rang the bell, … he rang the bell once more, a longer, more persistent ring’ (64). The episode, as her neighbour Fadia succinctly puts it, forebodes trouble (64). Aaliya refuses to receive her mother, and the whole affair ends in a fiasco. Predictably, when the doorbell rings again towards the end of the novel, more trouble surfaces. The three witches rush into Aaliya’s apartment to inform her that a waterpipe has burst in the apartment right above hers, and hence Aaliya’s precious manuscripts are flooded, some of them in fact destroyed: ‘My doorbell rings and I am disoriented … The doorbell buzzes once more’ (263). The two works also share scenes of suicide: Lady Macbeth commits suicide offstage, prompting Macbeth to meditate on her death in the famous ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow’ soliloquy, and Hannah, Aaliya’s only friend, commits suicide by jumping from the fourth floor (248). A crestfallen Aaliya reports the episode to the reader in the way a messenger brings Macbeth the news of his wife’s death. Aaliya herself considers committing suicide: ‘I can’t help myself. My mind leads my thoughts to death on a leash’ (270).

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In Macbeth, Lady Macbeth implores the gods to give her the courage to behave like a man, to realize the prophecy of the three witches: … Come, you spirits That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full Of direst cruelty; make thick my blood, Stop up th’access and passage to remorse. (1.5.36–40)

As Chamberlain puts it, Lady Macbeth ‘craves … an alternative gender identity, one which will allow her to slip free of the emotional as well as cultural constraints governing women’.13 Likewise, as a result of living in a war-torn city, Aaliya adopts a manly persona. During the civil war, Aaliya acquires an AK-47 (67–68), which during the war lies next to her ‘where [her] husband used to sleep all those years earlier’ (19). In Macbeth, the witches, to cite Kathleen McLuskie, ‘provide a brilliant dramatic device to increase the suspense, to drive the narrative to its conclusion, and to keep the audience on tenterhooks about how the action will be resolved’.14 In Alameddine’s novel, the three witches are Aaliya’s neighbours in the building, Joumana, MarieThérèse and Fadia. Introduced in the novel’s opening scene (3), they appear at crucial moments in the plot, reveal aspects of Aaliya’s life she tries to hide from public eyes, and at the end of the novel, visit Aaliya’s apartment and haunt her: ‘The three wet witches jostle into my foyer, they speak together, all at the same time, high-pitched Disney-like chatter, and I’m flummoxed and confused’ (263). They invade her apartment and metaphorically hold her hostage: ‘Haphazardly soggy, the witches surround me, orbit me like planets on Dexedrine, talking, talking, talking’ (264). Like their counterparts in Macbeth, the three witches in An Un­ necessary Woman appear accompanied by thunder and rough weather conditions. Aaliya notes that ‘[r]ain falls behind the witches as if surrounding them; there is no wall at their backs’ (169). While the three women are helping Aaliya restore the damaged manuscripts, Aaliya describes the weather conditions: ‘It rains and rains. My soul is damp from hearing it. It drizzles, then showers, then drizzles, then showers’ (272). This gothic atmosphere complements Aaliyah’s fantasy of a ghastly scene the night before, reminiscent of Duncan’s murder in Macbeth’s castle: ‘I heard Joumana murder someone,



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probably her husband, and drag the corpse around the house in circles over and over’ (261). The links that Alameddine establishes with Macbeth remind us that ‘the text is not an individual, isolated object but, rather, a compilation of cultural textuality’.15 By invoking the gruesome events that Shakespeare dramatizes in Macbeth, Alameddine dramatizes the psychological damage that Lebanon’s civil war has caused and continues to cause for the Lebanese people, represented in this novel by Aaliya, whose mind the novel unveils just as Shakespeare enters Lady Macbeth’s mind.

Alameddine’s Appropriation of King Lear I, The Divine: A Novel in First Chapters tells the story of Sarah Nour El-Din, a Druze Lebanese-American artist who tries in vain to write her memoir, but, as the subtitle suggests, never gets beyond the first chapter. Sarah is the youngest of three daughters of a Druze Lebanese doctor, Mustapha, and an American mother, Janet, whom her father divorced because of her ‘failure’ to produce a son. Sarah narrates her traumatic experiences during the nation’s civil war, when she was gang-raped and her half-sister was killed, and describes her experiences in 1990s New York and San Francisco, where she lives in self-imposed exile. Sarah consciously compares herself to Shakespeare’s Cordelia. Christina Garrigos argues that I, the Divine ‘is constructed by means of a kaleidoscopic technique that allows the protagonist, Sarah, to revise her life and consequently to re-invent herself’.16 Sarah informs the reader that her grandfather has named her after famous French actress Sarah Bernhardt, who played the role of Cordelia at the Odéon in the late nineteenth century. In the novel Sarah is the youngest of three sisters,17 and is her father’s sweetheart: ‘I was his favorite daughter, his Cordelia. He always considered my uniqueness enchanting’ (35). Shakespeare’s Lear condemns Cordelia and disinherits her when she refuses to express her love for him in flattering words: I loved her most, and thought to set my rest On her kind nursery. [to Cordelia] Hence and avoid my sight. So be my grave my peace, as here I give Her father’s heart from her. (1.1.124–27)

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Likewise, Sarah’s father’s love for her turns sour, under the influence of Sarah’s stepmother: ‘After years of her nagging, he began to see me as a lost cause, an embarrassment to the family’ (35). Eventually, she comes to perceive herself as ‘the black sheep of the family … without any of the advantages of being one, just the disadvantages’ (247). In both cases, the love-turned-hate relationship between a father and his daughter leads to a marriage that can be described as controversial, if not demeaning. In King Lear, Lear offers Cordelia without a dowry to the Duke of Burgundy: ‘When she was dear to us, we did hold her so, / But now her price is fallen’ (1.1.197–99). When the Duke of Burgundy gives no definite answer, Lear further debases and humiliates Cordelia: Sir, will you, with those infirmities she owes, Unfriended, new-adopted to our hate, Dowered with our curse, and strangered with our oath, Take her, or leave her? (1.1.203–6)

In I, the Divine, Sarah gets married to Omar under similarly controversial circumstances: she elopes with her Greek Orthodox lover without the two families’ blessings: ‘My father did not want me to repeat his mistakes. … His [Omar’s] parents, on the other hand, did not think I was a good match for their son’ (51). Yet just as in King Lear, where the king of France agrees to marry Cordelia without a dowry, exalts her virtues and announces her as his queen – ‘Thy dowerless daughter, King, thrown to my chance, / Is queen of us, of ours, and our fair France’ (1.1.262–63) – Omar compensates his wife for her loss: ‘He [Omar] treated me like a queen’ (51, emphasis added). Eventually this relationship ends in divorce; Sarah’s second marriage, to a Jewish American man, does not withstand the political turmoil of the Middle East. After a period of estrangement and separation, Cordelia and Sarah are both reunited with their fathers. Upon receiving the news that Goneril and Regan have mistreated Lear, Cordelia returns at the head of a French army to rescue her father, bringing him a physician to cure him. She addresses her sleeping father, saying: O my dear father, Restoration hang Thy medicine on my lips, and let this kiss Repair those violent harms that my two sisters Have in thy reverence made. (4.7.26–29)



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At which point Kent exclaims, ‘Kind and dear princess!’ (4.7.30). In I, the Divine, Sarah is also reunited with her father, after a period of estrangement and self-imposed exile in the United States (accentuating the parallel, she even returns via France). Like Lear, Sarah’s father is sick and needs nursing. As she disembarks the plane, Sarah goes directly to the hospital: My father sits propped up by many pillows on the angled hospital bed … ‘Ah,’ my father yells, ‘the princess is finally here.’ His pleasure reflects more than my arrival. This has been his third brush with death in the past two years. ‘She’ll only show up if I’m dying.’ I bend over and kiss him, noticing how much he has aged. (267, emphasis added)

In the above two scenes, the daughter’s nursing and kissing of her aging father and the description of her as a ‘princess’ make clear the link between the two texts. Moreover, both reunion scenes describe the father’s face. In King Lear, Cordelia laments her father’s physical condition: ‘Was this a face / To be opposed against the warring winds?’ (4.7.31–32). Similarly, when Sarah sees her father in the hospital, she comments: ‘My father’s face has always been asymmetrical, but lately it is exaggerated. … His face gaunt’ (267). Both texts depict rivalry and competition between the three sisters. Sarah’s father fosters and even relishes a competition between his three daughters: He [Sarah’s father] used to love telling us ‘Sleeping Beauty.’ He would show us each a mirror and in a solemn voice, tell us in English, ‘Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?’ My sister, Amal, would shout, ‘Sleeping Beauty.’ Lamia stayed silent, as if she were being asked a trick question. I would shout, ‘Me!’ My father loved that. (138)

This episode adds a fairy tale tint to Alameddine’s novel, similar to that of King Lear (in fact, Sarah herself views her life as a fairy tale [52]). Sarah declares that she did not get along with Lamia: ‘I believe she hated me and always felt inferior, or at least, I can say, she was filled with envy’ (123–24). Lamia is Sarah’s least favourite sister, ‘act[ing] as her nemesis or antagonist’.18 Sarah’s sisters are cruel and brutal, like Cordelia’s: Sarah describes her sisters as ‘murderesses’; in the case of Lamia, a nurse, the accusation is accurate, as she has deliberately murdered patients in her care. Adultery is another motif that the two novels share. In King Lear, Goneril sends a letter to Edmund to express her love for him, encouraging him to murder her husband, Albany (4.6.257–65). In

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I, the Divine, Sarah’s oldest sister, Amal, has an affair which she reveals to Sarah (133). Both women despise their husbands: Goneril calls Albany a fool who usurps her bed (4.2.28) and Amal calls her husband an ‘idiot’ with whom she has shared the marriage bed for twenty years (133). The two texts likewise share a motif of foretelling and prophesizing. In King Lear, the Fool outlines the Merlin prophecy: Then shall the realm of Albion Come to great confusion: Then comes the time, who lives to see’t, That going shall be used with feet. This prophecy Merlin shall make, for I live before his time. (3.2.79–95)

As Kiernan Ryan puts it, ‘the Fool’s vatic doggerel … deliberately dislocate[s] and confound[s] our temporal point of view … Past, future and present are scrambled to activate their conflation in our response to the play’.19 In short, the prophecy forebodes religious, social and cultural chaos and confusion. In I, the Divine, as soon as Sarah’s mother Janet arrives in Lebanon, she visits a fortune-teller who elaborately outlines an upheaval in Janet’s life: ‘Tell her I see trouble … Tell her she’ll drown if she tries to swim. She must not fight. The two worlds will clash and she’s not strong enough to fight’ (225–26).

Making Lebanon’s Suffering Personal The Shakespeare intertexts serve a didactic aim: they make it easier for the Anglo-American reader to relate to Lebanon’s suffering. Alameddine’s prose furthers this aim through other strategies as well, most prominently through narratives linking personal pain to national catastrophe. For Aaliya, any narrative of the civil war is obstructed, as too many competing narratives need to be accommodated and reconciled: How do I talk about the betrayal we felt when Lebanese killed Lebanese once more? For years, since the end of the war in 1990, we deluded ourselves into thinking that we’d never fight each other again. We thought we’d buried our horror. Yet the Lebanese do not wish to examine that period of history. We, like most humans, consider history a lesson on a blackboard that can be sponged off. We’d rather ostrich life’s difficulties. (193)



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Aaliya comments that memories of the civil war always threaten to disrupt attempts to unify a nation divided on factional, religious and sectarian bases. As Sune Haugbolle puts it, Lebanon’s civil war is ‘precarious because it produces disjunctions with precepts of a nationalist discourse’.20 While successive governments try ‘to form a coherent national narrative’, memories by individuals and communities defy these attempts and disrupt them.21 This situation has contributed to a culture of amnesia that ‘covers a generational divide’ between those who lived the war and those who were too young to remember the war.22 In An Unnecessary Woman, Aaliya’s life story is entangled with Lebanon’s civil war. For instance, Aaliya’s starting point for narrating how she came to live in her apartment is intricately linked to the civil war, when the Israeli siege on Beirut pushed people to abandon the city: ‘Many inhabitants of the city had fled and squatters quickly took up residence in the empty homes. Those of us who remained, those who had nowhere else to go, were emotionally weary, fed but not nourished by fear and adrenaline’ (19). As Aaliya narrates her story, she also relates the tragic events that have shaped her nation, including several Israeli invasions and assaults on Lebanon. Beirut had become a city of death, fear and terror, and the whole country had plunged into a state of turmoil and disorder. Aaliya’s brother, whom she describes as a coward, had become a murderer, or at least was complicit in murdering his boss at the hotel. Her monologue takes on a journalistic tone: ‘The southern suburbs of our city were nearly wiped out, hundreds if not thousands were killed. They bombed every bridge in the country, every electric plant’ (194). Lebanon had been cursed with a civil war that facilitated repeated interventions of foreign military forces. Just as the English forces intervene to restore Malcolm to the throne, and the French army restores Lear to his, Syrian and Israeli troops, albeit for less noble reasons, intervene in Lebanon to protect and support their allies. During the war, Aaliya replaces her husband with a machine gun: ‘I have to mention here that just because I slept with an AK-47 in place of a husband during the war does not make me insane. Owning an assault rifle was not an indicator of craziness’ (26). In fact, she acquires the gun from Ahmad, a former Palestinian friend who has joined militant groups and, ironically, moved up in the world; Aaliya has sex with him in exchange for the Kalashnikov (42–44).

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Aaliya also remembers graphic scenes from the war, like the death of her neighbour who ‘was shot in the head while driving home from work’ (98), and finding a corpse at the entrance of her building (149). She refers to specific dates and episodes: ‘In the summer of 1982, while Israeli armored tanks and gunships imposed a siege … on rampartless Beirut … the modern catapults, the air force, levelled residential buildings, destroyed all infrastructure’ (196). She even meditates on the aftermath of the war: ‘No trace of the psychological scars those battles caused can be found on any Beiruti, however. We suppress trauma so very well. We postpone the unbreathable darkness that weighs us down’ (193). I, the Divine provides a similarly intense portrayal of the civil war. Sarah says: ‘The war in Beirut intensified, with the Israeli invasion, the blowing up of the U.S. marines, and the massacre at Sabra and Chatila’ (54). Sarah’s half-sister Rana was shot dead in 1978 by a Syrian soldier who was infatuated with her. Nearly every Lebanese family ‘suffered because at least one family member was killed … ; death became the overpowering reason’ (63). Like Aaliya, Sarah chronicles specific episodes from the war, like the Syrian army’s intervention in 1978 and the Israeli invasion in 1982: ‘Israel invaded Lebanon, killing hundreds of Lebanese civilians. Instead of fighting the Israelis, the Syrians turned their guns on the Christians of East Beirut, killing hundreds of Lebanese civilians’ (64). For Sarah, Lebanon holds horrible memories, mainly because she was raped at the age of sixteen during the nation’s civil war: ‘One hour. In only one hour, her life had come to an end. In only one hour, her dreams were shattered. In only one hour she thought bitterly, she had become a woman. She was no longer a virgin’ (199). As Carol Fadda-Conrey argues, Sarah has ‘intensely traumatic memories of Beirut’;23 ‘Sarah cannot tell a story about the civil war without confronting the terrible misdeed committed against her’.24 These traumatic experiences accompany Sarah even after she moves out of Lebanon. In the safety of the United States, Fourth of July fireworks make her ‘g[o] under the covers, just like she used to do in Beirut when it got too noisy, too violent’ (92).



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Conclusion For Alameddine, as for other Arab American writers, ‘[l]iterary and cultural productions … are sites for manifesting/contesting an Arab American identity and delineating its features’.25 Arab writers in diaspora appropriate Shakespeare’s works into their own for aesthetic, philosophical and didactic purposes. Seen from this perspective, Alameddine’s novels are sites where Arab traditions and mores rub shoulders with Western conventions and values. In his two novels, An Unnecessary Woman and I, the Divine, Alameddine borrows lines, characters, motifs and tropes from Shakespeare’s plays in order to frame narratives that ‘re-examine a critical episode in the recent history of his country, the war in Lebanon’.26 His novels serve, in a sense, as a riposte to poet Czeslaw Milosz’s famous observation that during the Lebanese civil war, ‘causing someone’s death was dissociated from the reek of demonism, pangs of conscience, and similar accessories of Shakespeare drama’ (quoted in An Unnecessary Woman, 70). As a traumatic experience, Lebanon’s civil war has caused ‘the violent fragmentation of a uniquely pluralistic and cosmopolitan Arab society into fairly distinct sectarian areas’.27 As victims yet survivors of this fragmentation, Aaliya and Sarah ‘pla[y] out psychologically the unfinished trauma of war’.28 Chronicling the lived experiences of Lebanese characters during and in the aftermath of the country’s fifteen-year civil war, Alameddine’s skilful appropriation of Shakespeare’s tragedies greatly contributes to humanizing – by dramatizing – the dilemma of a nation wrecked and divided by an inerasable traumatic memory. Yousef Awad is Associate Professor at the University of Jordan. His first monograph, The Arab Atlantic: Resistance, Diaspora, and Transcultural Dialogue in the Works of Arab British and Arab American Women Writers (Lambert Academic Publishing, 2012), is based on his 2011 PhD thesis at the University of Manchester. Since then, Dr. Awad has published a number of articles exploring such themes as cultural translation, identity and multiculturalism in the works of Arab writers in diaspora.

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Notes 1. Salah D. Hassan, ‘UnStated: Narrating War in Lebanon’, PMLA 123, no. 5 (2008): 1622. 2. Page references from both novels are given in parentheses in the text, and refer to the following editions: An Unnecessary Woman (London: Corsair, 2013) and I, the Divine: A Novel in First Chapters (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001). 3. Dieter Mehl, Shakespeare’s Tragedies: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 78. 4. Line references come from the following editions of Shakespeare’s plays: King Lear, The Arden Shakespeare. 3rd series, ed. R.A. Foakes (London: Arden, 1997) and Macbeth, The New Cambridge Shakespeare, ed. A.R. Braunmuller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 5. Mehl, Shakespeare’s Tragedies, 126. 6. Janette Dillon, The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare’s Tragedies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 104–5. 7. Email to the author, 30 May 2016. 8. Syrine Hout, ‘Cultural Hybridity, Trauma, and Memory in Diasporic Anglophone Lebanese Fiction’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing 47, no. 3 (2011): 332. 9. Graham Holderness, ‘Introduction’, in Sulayman Al Bassam, The Arab Shakespeare Trilogy (London and New York: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2014), viii–ix. 10. Jumana Bayeh, ‘Borders and Hybridity: Subjectivity in Rabih Alameddine’s I, the Divine’, in Mizan 21: Borders and Beyond: Crossings and Translations in Modern Arabic Literature, ed. K. Eksell and S. Guth (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 2011), 41. 11. Wail S. Hassan, Immigrant Narratives: Orientalism and Cultural Translation in Arab American and Arab British Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 206. 12. Cf. Nicholas Royle, How to Read Shakespeare (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2005), 89. 13. Stephanie Chamberlain, ‘Fantasizing Infanticide: Lady Macbeth and the Murdering Mother in Early Modern England’, College Literature 32, no. 3 (2005): 80. 14. Kathleen McLuskie, ‘Macbeth, the Present, and the Past’, in A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, Volume I: The Tragedies, ed. Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005), 395–96. 15. Graham Allen, Intertextuality, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2011), 36. 16. Christina Garrigos, ‘The Dynamics of Intercultural Dislocation: Hybridity in Rabih Alameddine’s I, the Divine’, in Arab Voices in Diaspora: Critical Perspectives on Anglophone Arab Literature, ed. Layla Al Maleh (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2009), 191. 17. Sarah is the youngest of three sisters from the same parents. After the birth of Sarah, her father divorces her American mother, who then returns to the US, severs her ties with her daughters and eventually commits suicide. In addition to her sisters, Amal and Lamia, Sarah has a half-sister who is shot dead at the age of fifteen, and a half-brother who lives in the US and does not play a major role in the novel.



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18. Steven Salaita, Modern Arab American Fiction: A Reader’s Guide (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2011), 52. 19. Kiernan Ryan, ‘King Lear’, in Dutton and Howard, A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, 381. 20. Sune Haugbolle, ‘Public and Private Memory of the Lebanese Civil War’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 25, no. 1 (2005): 196. 21. Ibid., 202. 22. Ibid., 194. 23. Carol Fadda-Conrey, Contemporary Arab-American Literature: Transnational Reconfigurations of Citizenship and Belonging (New York and London: New York University Press, 2014), 118–19. 24. Salaita, Modern Arab American Fiction, 52. 25. Yousef Awad, The Arab Atlantic: Resistance, Diaspora, and Trans-cultural Dialogue in the Works of Arab British and Arab American Women Writers (Saarbrucken: Lambert Academic Publication, 2012), 85. 26. Garrigos, ‘The Dynamics of Intercultural Dislocation’, 187. 27. Haugbolle, ‘Public and Private Memory’, 200. 28. Syrine Hout, ‘The Tears of Trauma: Memories of Home, War, and Exile in Rabih Alameddine’s I, the Divine’, World Literature Today (2008): 61.

& Chapter 10

An Arabian Night with Swedish Direction Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Egypt and Sweden, 2003 Robert Lyons

In recent years, refugees from the Middle East have been arriving in Sweden in considerable numbers, and the need for and extent of co-operative work between Swedish and Arab performing artists is constantly increasing. Karim Rashed from Iraq, now living in Malmö, performed in his own prize-winning bilingual play about loyalty issues among refugees, I Came to See You, in a mixed cast of established Swedes and recent arrivals at the Malmö City Theatre in southern Sweden last year.1 With the support of the Swedish Arts Council and Stockholm City, Helen Al-Janabi from Syria recently established the Arabic Theatre in Stockholm, which will present Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince this coming November, the theatre’s first full-scale Arabic-language production.2 The Freedom Theatre of Jenin, Palestine, was co-founded by a Swedish activist;3 it has been running workshops and performing in Sweden’s three largest Notes for this section begin on page 196.

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cities – the two mentioned above as well as Gothenburg in the west – for a number of years.4 In fact, Swedish-Arab theatrical co-operation has been going on for decades. This brief report presents an unusual project from 2003, in which a Swedish production team and a panArab cast met in Alexandria to bring an English classic to life in a time of escalating conflict.

Boundary Crossings – 1989 Eva Bergman, daughter of Ingmar Bergman and an important stage director in her own right, directed Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1989 at Backa Theatre in Gothenburg, Sweden. This highly successful production was the company’s first Shakespeare play. Bergman approached The Dream by alerting youthful Swedish audiences of the late 1980s to the emotional complications and societal issues that linked Shakespeare to modern Swedes. Shakespeare’s treatment of the friction between hot-blooded, independent-­ minded youths and their overbearing, law-abiding parents was as up-to-date as could be, as were the themes of male domination and the weighted struggle between urban and rural values. Bergman’s direction put strong emphasis on identity uncertainty, a topical issue in Sweden at the time. Generally speaking, the 1960s and 1970s had been a period of strong political tensions, of taking sides and joining groups in relation to issues such as US involvement in Vietnam and nuclear disarmament. This challenged class-related and hierarchical structures within Swedish society, and by the 1980s, self-realization had become a popular concept. A gradual shift during that decade and into the next took place from overt political positioning to the search for self-fulfilment. In Bergman’s production the role of Flute, the working class mechanical, was deleted, and Lysander, the upper class young urbanite in love with Hermia, took over Flute’s involvement with the amateur drama group in the play-within-the-play. Also an aspiring rock guitarist, this Lysander was drawn to the fairy band. In other words, the character became a class boundary-breaker searching for a position of his own. He functioned as a focal point for the identity confusion rampant in the show, as in society at large at the time. Bergman’s methods included relating Shakespeare’s characters and situations to the midsummer of Swedish folklore, folk music and modern popular experience. It was in particular this ­cross-­cultural

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aspect of the performance that first captured my interest as a theatre researcher. Consequently, my dissertation (‘Swedish Midsummer in Shakespeare’s Dream’, Gothenburg, 1998) investigated the creative process leading up to that particular production.

Boundary Crossings – 2003 During the first months of 2003, Eva Bergman once again directed A Midsummer Night’s Dream and, once again, she did so in a spirit of cross-culturalism. The play ran from 25 March to 30 May 2003 in Alexandria, Gothenburg and Stockholm, with the same cast performing in all three cities. But while it seems logical to make use of Swedish midsummer when producing Shakespeare’s play in Sweden, it is hardly so for a Swedish director to gather Swedes, Egyptians, Moroccans, Lebanese and Palestinians in woodless Egypt to perform a story set in a magical Athenian forest. Neither has the summer solstice any particular significance in the Arabic world. And what of the politics of it? Why produce an English classic in the Middle East during the US-led war on Iraq? This report will provide a brief glimpse into my research of the period, which centred on this new production, performed in Arabic, a language that I myself do not understand. Fortunately for me, t­heatre is a conglomeration of many languages, many systems of symbolic communication expressed through sets and lighting design, costumes and make-up, dance and movement, facial expression and gesture, music and sound. Dramatic stories are told through all of these as well as through words. Theatre does not exist without an audience, rendering the concepts of context and relevance as central to the art form as the above-listed systems, and in constant interaction with them. My work with this particular research project began with a weeklong visit to Alexandria in March 2003 to see the final rehearsals and the first performances of this production, and to begin interviewing the members of the cast and crew. After that week, I continued to follow performances and interview personnel back in Sweden. I conducted thirty-eight interviews in connection with the project; my interviews with Arabic-speaking members of the company were conducted in English, using interpreters when necessary. This report is based on some of these interviews and personal observations. After describing how the project began and why Bergman chose

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­Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I will address two particular contextual aspects of the production, firstly by considering the group of characters called ‘the Mechanicals’ in their urban Arab setting, and secondly by looking at the company’s way of dealing with the US war on Iraq.

Initiating the Project – 2000 Backa Theatre’s first contact with the world of Arabic theatre occurred in 1998, when they took part in seminars and workshops at the Amman International Theatre Festival in Jordan. In 1999 they returned to the festival with a performance of Eva Bergman’s Drömpappa (Dream Daddy). The musicians from Backa also ran a workshop with Jordanian colleagues. In addition, Backa dramaturge Lena Fridell and playwright Mattias Andersson conducted a well-­ received playwriting workshop, followed in October 2000 by another held in Aqaba, Jordan. These workshops, financed by the Swedish Foreign Aid Authority (SIDA) and the Swedish Dramatic Institute (Dramatiska Institutet), were expressly aimed at supporting and strengthening contemporary theatre in the Arab world. Eva Bergman attended the Aqaba workshop as an observer. She was impressed by the work of a number of participants, notably Said Ragab and Driss Roukhe, both of whom were later to be members of her ensemble. Said Ragab would also take on the complex job of translating the text into Egyptian colloquial Arabic. Dramaturge Lena Fridell recounts that many of the workshop participants were exhilarated by the opportunity to meet and work together with their colleagues across international borders, and wanted to continue doing so after the workshop via a specific performance project. For such a project to succeed, the Arab theatre professionals from around the region felt the need for strong artistic leadership, preferably from outside the Arab world, so that petty differences between them would not take on exaggerated significance. So they asked Bergman if she would be interested in directing a pan-Arab project, and she quickly said yes. In retrospect, B ­ ergman thought she had been naive. She has expressed relief that, at the outset, she didn’t see the difficulties ahead, such as language barriers and cultural differences. What captured her imagination was the possibility of working with an international Arab cast with entirely different performance traditions from her own. The working

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method she had developed and refined through the years includes the performers themselves deeply in the formative process. So she knew that she could learn very much indeed by working with such an ensemble – and that their diverse backgrounds and forms of expression could add new dimensions to playscripts and performances for potential audiences. Representatives from SIDA and the Swedish Dramatic Institute were interested in supporting the project as a worthy continuation of the workshop contacts. A number of follow-up meetings were then held in Sweden and Egypt. Among the many pressing issues discussed was the choice of a script. Should the project be based on a Swedish text? An Arabic text? A number of playwrights and texts were considered, but Bergman’s intense interest in Shakespeare impressed the group.

Why Shakespeare? Neither a Swede nor an Egyptian, Shakespeare (1564–1616) could be seen as a foreigner by both, and his fictional worlds, created 400 years ago, would be exotic to both. At the same time, his plays have become world literature, the cultural property of us all, with a wealth of interesting roles for performers. Furthermore, they are classic, with stories and characters familiar to theatre professionals everywhere and with content open for interpretation in all contexts, including, for instance, contemporary Alexandria. Bergman’s personal interest in working with Shakespeare stems from her readings of his texts from the perspective of ‘people’s theatre’. Shakespeare’s original productions were done for broad audiences, most of whom were illiterate and uneducated. These ‘groundlings’ provided the economic base for his theatre and required – and received – accessible high-quality entertainment on many levels. With her own Shakespearean productions, Bergman strives to find and uphold this attitude of respect for the entire spectrum of potential audiences, not only the contemporary cultural elite familiar with his plays.

Why A Midsummer Night’s Dream? Were it to be Shakespeare, Bergman wanted to do a comedy, because she felt comedy could provide a lightness and an enjoyable

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frame for the production and rehearsal processes as well as for the performance itself. The group discussed As You Like It for a time but eventually dropped it, as they experienced the story as rather superficial. Bergman then suggested A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595/96), and the group was quick to find the suggestion fruitful. Not only did Bergman have deep previous knowledge of the play via her earlier production, but that earlier production had also involved dramaturge Lena Fridell, producer Brita Papini, composer/musician Bo Stenholm and sound designer/technician Charlie Schaloske, all of whom participated in planning the new project. Furthermore, the play’s central framing device – Hermia defying her father Egeus’s dictates regarding whom she should marry – was something of a fairy tale fiction in the 1989 Gothenburg production, but in 2003 could easily be seen as chillingly relevant in Alexandria, as well as in Gothenburg, where the population from the mid1980s and throughout the 1990s had seen a significant increase of immigrants from traditional societies in Africa and the Middle East. In 2002 all of Sweden had been shocked by the ‘honour killing’ in Uppsala of Fadime Sahindal, an émigré who had defied her Kurdish father’s wishes by falling in love with a young Swedish man. Bergman had in fact been hoping to be able to work once again on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, to further investigate the play. Even during the Backa Theatre production period in 1989, Bergman sensed other possibilities, other choices, the consequences of which she would have liked to explore. One of the strands in the plot of this complex play involves ‘the Mechanicals’, a group of workers who comically rehearse and poorly perform an amateur production of a badly written text entitled Pyramus and Thisbe at the wedding party of their ruler Duke Theseus and his captive bride Hippolyta. Bergman wondered: what if these Mechanicals, firmly rooted in their work identities, were to take their amateur dramatics more seriously? Exploring this possibility in Alexandria in 2003 yielded a wealth of material.

The Mechanicals in the Alexandrian Context Even before a word was spoken in this new version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, its Arab grounding was apparent, expressed through costume, properties and music. The first character to appear onstage is Boutros El Murr (Peter Quince), the only member of the group of

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Mechanicals/friends who can write. He sits at an outdoor table writing his play Pyramus and Thisbe. His normal job might well be that of a scribe, helping the people of the neighbourhood write letters to relatives and authorities. He wears western-style clothing, quite normal for working class people. But he has artistic pretensions – that is obvious by the way he wears his scarf. Abbas (Snout) is the second figure to appear onstage. He also seems representative of the poorer segment of the population, and is dressed in a mixture of Western and Arab styles, with leather shoes, kaftan and turban. Abbas throws himself down on a worn wooden bench beside the street, indicating that he often spends his days stretched out here. He hums a popular tune, instantly familiar to Egyptian audiences. Three other men dressed in inexpensive Western-style clothing then wander in and take their accustomed places with Abbas on the bench. One of them has a tape measure over his shoulders, indicating that he is Munfakh (Francis Flute) the tailor. Gamal (Snug) carries a bucket with flowers and greenery, and when he sits down he immediately starts binding them into garlands for sale. The occupation of Mitwalli El Qaar (Bottom) is unclear. Very likely unemployed, he represents that large group of city dwellers who take odd jobs when available. Mitwalli completes the circle of friends, who together establish a place and time familiar to Arab audiences: a contemporary urban centre where people with small businesses ply their trade along the streets. The Mechanicals were given more space in this production than their 1989 counterparts, thereby underlining and examining the lives and significance of Egypt’s urban working class. In my interviews with the company, several actors referred to their experiences of a dramatically widening gap between rich and poor in contemporary Egyptian society. This gap is clear in the production; a salient example is the sycophantic behaviour of the Mechanicals in the presence of El Basha (Theseus) and his corresponding condescension. Bergman’s original vision for the closing sequences of the 2003 production included music and dancing initiated by the Mechanicals at the wedding feast that then expanded to include the entire wedding party, before El Basha’s (Theseus’s) abrupt interruption of the festivities, which mercilessly recalls the separation of the classes in Shakespeare’s text. But the 2003 ensemble found the intended image of unity, of integration, no matter how fleeting, to be entirely

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too unrealistic. Thus, the only performance sequence offering even a slight hope of class reconciliation was cut, and the closing sequences, while underlining the comedic aspect of generational appeasement among the rich, emphasize the tragic oppression of the working poor by the upper class. At the final reckoning, the Mechanicals may well be far closer than the rich to the magical and creative world of the fairies, but they are hopelessly powerless on the societal level. As indicated by Shakespeare’s text, the Mechanicals’ use of language (and surely their corresponding acting style) was meant to contrast sharply to that of the court. Both of Bergman’s productions made use of this contrast. But as I have indicated, the role of Lysander in the 1989 Swedish version moved freely between the court and the Mechanicals, thereby questioning class identity and its accompanying forms of expression. No such ambiguity appeared in the 2003 version. Here the Me­ chanicals’ acting style was indubitably their own. It was broadly farcical, with expansive gestures, sudden rhythmic shifts and vocal gymnastics. It was unabashedly open to audience response, particularly approval. Audiences of all backgrounds are of course ready and willing to respond to classic farce. Beyond this, the Mechanicals’ antics offered initiated audiences ironic references to Arab television soap opera acting, as well as emphasizing loyalty within the working class.

The Performance during the War

The US-led war on Iraq created tensions and hardships for those directly and indirectly attacked. The atmosphere across the entire Arab world was infected with strong and frequently conflicting emotions such as fear, anger, resentment, patriotism, hope and resistance. The Midsummer Night’s Dream project was not directly threatened by the war, but the performers were constantly worried about their families, relatives and friends. Should they cut off the work and go home to their communities around the region or continue? Were they to continue, would they appear to be ignoring the situation and thereby condoning the US war on Iraq? Soul-searching discussions involved the entire cast and crew and representatives of the Jesuit Centre where the work was being done. They decided to continue their work, viewing it as a concrete mani­ festation of cultural resistance to the war. A statement of p ­ urpose and war resistance was formulated, signed by all, printed up in Arabic and English, and made available to all audiences in Egypt

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and Sweden. Brother Fayez Saad Attallah, director of cultural activities at the Jesuit Centre and liaison for the project, introduced all performances in Alexandria with reference to this cultural resistance and with a minute of silence for the Iraqi victims of the war. Through these concrete actions, the company reassured their audiences that they were ready to unite with them in an inter­ national, intercultural, aesthetic event dealing with authentic human problems parallel to and in direct opposition to the savage, ­inhuman event called war. Thus, the production of this Shakespearean comedy, initiated in discussions in Aqaba in 2000 and completed in Alexandria three years later, acquired new levels of significance in performance in both Egypt and Sweden, as an act of solidarity in a context of unfolding tragedy. Robert Lyons Ph.D, Senior Lecturer Emeritus, has taught Theatre Studies at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden for more than three decades, linking theory with practice and students with theatre professionals in seminars and at the theatre. He has guest lectured primarily at Plymouth University, England and at The Freedom ­T heatre school in Jenin, Palestine. His research examines crossand multicultural and political theatre. His most recent publication is “Brecht and Politics at The Freedom Theatre” in The Freedom ­T heatre. Performing cultural resistance in Palestine, ed. Ola Johansson and Johanna Wallin, LeftWord Books, New Delhi, 2018.

Notes 1. For a review in English, see Margaret Litvin, ‘Arab Angst on Swedish Stages’, Arab Stages 4, http://arabstages.org/2016/04/arab-angst-on-swedish-stages/. 2. See http://www.arabiskateatern.se/. 3. Jonatan Stanczak, for more on whom see Erin B. Mee, ‘The Cultural Intifada: Palestinian Theatre in the West Bank’, The Drama Review 56, no. 3 (2012): 167–177. 4. See http://www.thefreedomtheatre.org/friends-supporters/sweden/.

& Chapter 11

‘Rudely Interrupted’ Shakespeare and Terrorism Graham Holderness and Bryan Loughrey

I 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 office 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.1 Now he left the office 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.2

Notes for this section begin on page 211.

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II That same Saturday the Doha Players were putting on Twelfth Night in their own theatre in Fariq Kalaib. The production was playing to an audience of around seventy people, including Western expatriates, Palestinians and Lebanese, Eritreans and Somalis, and local Qataris. Previous performances had been praised by the local press as ‘lively’ and ‘fresh’. The production featured a Caribbean setting, and the stage backdrop vibrated with tropical colour. The show was in full swing. One year before, the Doha Players had celebrated their fiftieth anniversary as an amateur theatrical group. The tiny Gulf state of Qatar (population 840,000, mostly expatriate) is a hive of theatrical activity, owing to the diverse population and to strong support from the state, with at least four functioning theatre groups, including a national theatre. The facilities afforded to theatre in the country, all based initially on grants from the ruling royal family, are probably the best in the Middle East. The Doha Players is a largely British and Commonwealth group, which enjoys the support of the local community, including Arab expatriates, as well as the British Ambassador.3 The theatre building in which Twelfth Night was being performed was built in 1979. It stood close to the Doha English-Speaking School. Initially the theatre was an out-of-town venue, like Shakespeare’s Globe, but the suburbs have grown around it. Adjacent to the theatre stood a hall known as the West End, in nostalgic memory of London’s theatre district, and which was used as a tea and coffee bar at intermissions. On the main door of the theatre were carved conventional masks of tragedy and comedy, recognised emblems of theatre throughout the world, and a familiar sight in London’s own West End.

III In the name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful, Sawd Al-Jihad presents ‘A Letter to the Mujahideen in Iraq’: O defenders of the religion, brave lions who support words with actions; O those who have fulfilled their promise and given up everything for the sake of Allah: continue in your path of honour. We will not let the crusaders set foot in any place in the land of the prophet Mohammed.



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I also command all the brave lions of jihad in Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, the United Arab Emirates and all the countries surrounding Iraq to support you. If every bee stings the pig from a different direction, then he will die from his wounds. O guardians of Islam, stand firm alongside your brothers so that Allah will stand firm next to you.4

IV The intermission was drawing to a close, and the second half of the play due to start (the performance had been rescheduled by one hour to allow for an earlier finish). Members of the animated and excited audience were ushered into the auditorium to take their seats. Enter Viola, and Clown with a tabour. viola: Save thee, friend, and thy music: dost thou live by thy tabour? clown: No, sir, I live by the church. viola: Art thou a churchman? clown: No such matter, sir: I do live by the church; for I do live at my house, and my house doth stand by the church. viola: So thou mayst say, the king lies by a beggar, if a beggar dwell near him; or, the church stands by thy tabour, if thy tabour stand by the church. clown: You have said, sir. To see this age! A sentence is but a cheveril glove to a good wit: how quickly the wrong side may be turned outward! (III.i.1–13)

V Omar Ahmed Abdullah Ali stopped his car within view of the theatre. He could see the building, the theatre and its annex, the breezeblock perimeter wall and cars parked in a defensive circle around it. He could see the steps leading up to the door of the theatre. There were no sentries or guards, no additional security, no locked doors. There was a gap in the ring of cars wide enough for him to get through.5 Throughout the long, slow drive he had felt numb, detached, a man sidelined by the enormity of his own mission. Even the thought of the explosives with which the car was packed had caused him no particular concern. Now, as the moment approached, he began to feel anxious. His palms sweated on the steering wheel. Unwelcome images came to mind, pictures of wife and children, distractions. He

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focused, as he had been trained to do, on the objective of the action. We will not let the crusaders set foot. There will not be any safe passage. We promise to introduce them to the word terror over and over again, and they will try and translate it into all their languages.6 He eased the car into forward gear. Allah made us promise. Forsake everything in his cause, and for the sake of your victory.7 His grip tightened on the wheel. He floored the accelerator and sped towards the breeze block wall. The big car crashed through the wall, scattering dust and debris, and roared towards the steps of the theatre entrance. God is great. God is great. Brave lions of jihad. The car hit the steps with a bang, and the chassis grounded on the concrete. Desperately Omar tried to accelerate forward to drive into the building, but the wheels spun helplessly. The engine screamed. The play’s director, teacher and amateur actor Jonathan Adams, was sitting in the control room at the back of the theatre watching the performance. From outside he heard a bang and the sound of an engine running at high speed. Something was going on in the car park. The noise would disturb the performance. He went to the door to see what the commotion was all about. Omar saw Jonathan appear at the top of the steps. The mission was in jeopardy. Be clamorous, and leap all civil bounds/Rather than make unprofited return.8 God is great. He triggered his explosives. Jonathan took the full force of the blast and was blown back into the theatre, probably killed instantly. The suicide bomber also died. Twelve other people were injured, including six Qataris, a Briton, an Eritrean and a Somali, none seriously. The impact of the ‘massive explosion’9 was heard and felt inside the auditorium. Kerry Ruek, playing Feste, was blown from the stage in mid-speech. He remembers, with characteristic understatement, the performance being ‘rudely interrupted’.10 The sound and lighting engineers were blown out of the control room. Everything went dark. There was smoke everywhere, things were flying through the air. It was pandemonium.11 A gas explosion was suspected. Members of the Players quickly gathered children together to evacuate them. People streamed from the building. Outside what had happened was all too obvious. Nearby buildings had been extensively damaged. The windows of the school were all shattered. Cars were burning in the car park. People had been blown off their feet and were seen lying on the ground.12 The body



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of Jonathan Adams lay inside the ruined theatre entrance. His wife Rosemarie was the first to reach him. Kerry Ruek tried desperately to revive him, but to no avail.13 As the car had been tilted at an angle on the steps, the force of the explosion blew backwards and demolished the theatre annex. If the play had not been rescheduled, the annex would have been filled with members of the audience enjoying their interval tea and coffee.14 Had the mission gone according to plan, casualties would have been much higher. Instead, by luck and misjudgement, the terrorist succeeded in inflicting a few nonfatal wounds, and killing only himself and Jonathan Adams. In an instant, comedy had turned to tragedy. The theatre doors, with their comic and tragic masks, lay where they had been hurled among the building’s wreckage. How quickly the wrong side may be turned outward.

VI Qatar is a relative stranger to terrorism, though there are many reasons why it could be ranked as a prime Al-Qa’eda target. Qatar hosted the U.S. Central Command’s operational headquarters from early 2003, after it was shifted from Saudi Arabia, thus forming a bridgehead for the occupation of Iraq. The Al Saliya camp on the outskirts of Doha, only twelve miles from the theatre, houses two thousand U.S. troops. The U.S. Embassy was formerly located in the area occupied by the theatre, but now stands some six miles away. On 14 March 2005, days before the bombing, the U.S. State Department had issued a general warning to all its citizens travelling in the Gulf that ‘extremists may be planning to carry out attacks against Westerners and oil workers’ in the region. The Doha atrocity occurred on the second anniversary of the invasion of Iraq (launched on 20 March 2003). Conversations with the survivors of the attack indicate that at the time there was no particular awareness on the part of the Doha Players or their audience of any serious or imminent terrorist threat. Qatar had not seen this kind of violence before, and was thought of as very safe. No-one had even noticed the significance of the date. More significantly, the Players could see no rationale for an attack on them, their audience and their theatre. It is difficult for them to see what they do as in any way controversial. They are not a military or political organisation, and did not think of themselves as having

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any high-profile symbolic value. They see themselves as a diverse Qatari expatriate community, not an outpost of Western civilisation. They have no strong U.S. affiliation. They do nothing to antagonise local sentiments, serve no alcohol and conform obediently to the state’s byzantine censorship regulations. They are sceptical about any antitheatrical motivation deriving from Islamic dislike of drama, since there are also local theatre groups (Qatari Group Theatre and Gulf Group Theatre) as well as a national theatre.15 But targeted they were, and allegedly by Jund Al-Sham, the group which claimed responsibility for the attack. Only a few days before, an audio recording posted on an Islamist website, purporting to contain the voice of Saleh Mohammed Al-Aoofi, Al-Qa’eda’s commander in Saudi Arabia, suggested to intelligence analysts that a new phase of global terrorist organisation might well be in the process of formation. Al-Aoofi was paying homage to Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi (reportedly killed by US forces in Baghdad in 2005) as the heir apparent to Osama Bin Laden. Jund Al-Sham was the name of Al-Zarqawi’s Jordanian terrorist militia, and the implication was that its operations would be extended from insurgency in Iraq to Al Qa’eda’s territory of global jihad. The former French defence official Alexis Debat writes: Last week’s bombing in Doha may signal the beginning of that phase. Even though very little is know at this point about the Egyptian computer expert who exploded his car next to the Doha English-Speaking School, Jund Al Sham’s comeback on the global scene in a country so remote from its initial area of operation seems to validate a number of developments recently picked up by US and Iraqi intelligence services. This information is increasingly interpreted as indicating that Zarqawi has emerged as the most important operational leader of the global jihad and even a possible replacement to bin Laden as the figurehead of the movement.16

Shakespeare and jihad no longer appear such improbable bed­ fellows. The Doha Players may have served as a soft civilian target, like the Soho nightclub threatened in 2007 by a failed car-bomb in London. They may have represented a random gathering of Westerners and their associates, like the occupants of Glasgow Airport, who narrowly escaped violence from another grounded car-bomb in 2007. But it is far more likely, surely, that they represented what Jurgen Habermas calls a ‘symbolically suffused’ objective,17 one that brought together a loaded matrix of meanings: the English language;



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Western culture; Christian civilisation. These familiar terms, for the fundamentalist, translate as the foreigner; the infidel; the crusader. And in this instance all these figures were represented by the name of Shakespeare.

VII The Doha Players responded to this event with shocked innocence. Such candour may seem in retrospective analysis naïve, but God forbid that we should ever lose the capability of innocence, or the right of innocence to be shocked. Derrida was grasping at some such imperative when he spoke of 9/11, insisting on the absolute necessity of compassion for the victims and indignation over the killings. Our sadness and condemnation should be without limits, unconditional, unimpeachable … they respond with what might be called the heart and they go straight to the heart of the event.18

But Shakespeare is clearly inseparable from, indeed almost synony­ mous with, the Anglo-American Western culture that is identified (and not only by fundamentalists) with the Israel/Palestine problem, with the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and with a global cultural dominance inimical to Islam. Derrida again: The world order … targeted through this violence is dominated by the Anglo-American idiom, an idiom that is indissolubly linked to the political discourse that dominates the world stage, to international law, to diplomatic institutions, the media, and the greatest techno­ scientific, capitalist and military power.19

The Shakespeare of postcolonial criticism is often presented as an instrument of oppression. Postcolonial critics have shown how, over the previous two centuries, Anglo-American criticism consolidated an imperial Shakespeare, one whose works testified to the superiority of the civilised races and could be used to establish and maintain colonial authority.20 Shakespeare represents the crowning glory of the English language, but the history of how that language was extended from a parochial island tongue into the world language of one thousand million masks a much more violent process involving subjugation of native peoples, extirpation or annexation of native cultures, and the imposition through administrative and educational systems of Anglocentric norms and ideologies.

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The various forms of colonial response have been well studied and well documented. Some subjugated cultures engaged in imitation and mimicry, assisting the domestication of the foreign power. Elsewhere native intellectuals challenged colonial culture in favour of their own native literatures, initially by exposing the conscious or unconscious racist content of imperial fictions, as when Chinua Achebe declared that Joseph Conrad was ‘a bloody racist’.21 Dramatists in the former colonies began to reread Shakespeare from a colonised viewpoint. Postcolonial criticism also re-evaluated the early modern period in which empire had its origins, and demonstrated that colonial discourse was no mere passive backdrop to Shakespearean drama but rather one of its key discursive contexts.22 In other words, these plays were immersed in the formation of empire before they became its tools, ‘entangled from the beginning with the proj­ ects of nation-building, empire and colonization’.23 This is the Shakespeare referred to by the United Press International editor, Martin Walker, writing of the Doha bombing; the Shakespeare who stands for the Western invasion of Islam’s holy peninsula. He is the symbol of the English language that he helped perfect, and thus he also symbolizes its steady advance into the mouths and sensibilities of a generation of educated Arabs.24

VIII In Twelfth Night innocence is constitutive and foundational: the play ‘dallies with the innocence of love,/Like the old age’. (II.iv.47–8) But in the context described above it becomes harder to view a performance of Twelfth Night, in Qatar, on the second anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, as harmlessly innocent. It was of course exactly that, within the values of the liberal democratic culture the play itself embodies, and the Doha Players espouse. But to Omar Ahmed Abdullah Ali, and to those who trained and equipped him, it must have represented something much more inimical and provocative: a flagrant display of Western cultural power. It is still possible to recall, though only as a faint echo from an ‘old age’, that celebration of Twelfth Night as a kind of prelapsarian festivity: Twelfth Night … is filled to the brim and overflowing with the spirit that seeks to enjoy this world without one thought or aspiration beyond. It jumps the hereafter entirely.25



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A strict Muslim like Omar, taught from the very beginning of the Holy Quran to ‘have faith in the Hereafter’,26 would have had no illusions about being able to jump the life to come, and no sympathy for anyone who thought they could. There are those who do think, because they are virtuous, ‘there shall be no more cakes and ale’ (II.iii.114–5). If the play were nothing but cakes and ale, we too would be seeking elsewhere for the location of the virtuous; but it is not. Twelfth Night is not known to modern criticism as a simple celebration of fun-filled epicureanism. In fact it has been understood in completely the opposite way, as a wry reflection on the shallowness of irresponsible gaiety. W.H. Auden saw Shakespeare here in a mood of ‘puritanical aversion’ from the ‘pleasing illusions of life’; and Jan Kott thought it a ‘bitter comedy about the Elizabethan dolce vita’.27 To these critics, and to many others, the undertones of sadness, nostalgia and disillusion that haunt the play suggest an atmosphere of disenchantment and distaste for thoughtless pleasure. Sir Toby is ‘sure care’s an enemy to life’, but the play does not for one moment fall into the illusion that responsibility, ‘care’, can be ignored or set aside. In interpretations such as these, Malvolio becomes a serious witness to the conscience of the age, and a precursor of the Puritan Commonwealth. Malvolio, ‘a kind of Puritan’ (II.iii.140), rejects the epicurean dolce vita as vehemently as did Jawad Akbar and Omar Khyam, who plotted to blow up London’s Ministry of Sound nightclub.28 Malvolio sees himself as the natural heir to the household authority, and longs to be in a position where he can extirpate what he sees as riotous behaviour. He is tricked into making a fool of himself, and detained as a madman. He is ‘propertied’ (IV.ii.94), treated as an object without human rights. He is imprisoned in a dark cell (‘they have laid me here in hideous darkness’ [IV.ii.30]), and subjected to forms of torture such as sensory deprivation (‘They … keep me in darkness … and do all they can to face me out of my wits’ [4.2.94–6]).29 He feels that he has been ‘abused’ (‘there was never man so notoriously abused’ [IV.ii.90]), and his employer Olivia, having heard his story, is bound to agree: ‘he hath been most notoriously abused’ (V.i.380).30 To those who trick and torment him, all this is legitimate amusement. Olivia apologises to Malvolio, and the Duke commands Fabian to ‘pursue him, and entreat him to a peace’. (V.i.379) But the last words uttered by Malvolio on stage suggest that he will not be so easily entreated to a ‘peace’ on others’ terms: ‘I’ll be revenged on the

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whole pack of you!’ (V.i.377). These are not words calculated, like the fake letter of challenge, to ‘breed no terror’. (III.iv.190) They were never spoken on stage on 19 March 2007, as Omar Ahmed Abdullah Ali had successfully brought home his revenge against the whole pack of them. Terror was already breeding, already bred.

IX Twelfth Night ends with restoration, reconciliation and unity. The lost are found. Misunderstanding is cleared up, identity restored: ‘Cesario’ can turn her assumed masculine disguise inside out to reveal her true feminine self. The comic subplot is disclosed and Malvolio released from his bondage. The members of the cast are largely organised into heterosexual couples (Viola/Orsino, Olivia/ Sebastian, Sir Toby/Maria), so the convention of marriage is employed to realign the characters into an orderly configuration, free from disguise, transsexual relationship and misapprehension: When … golden time convents, A solemn combination shall be made Of our dear souls (V.i.381–3).

But the play does not actually end with this ‘solemn combination’, but with an isolated individual, and with a song. Feste’s valedictory ballad is a melancholy little reflection on the intrinsic unhappiness of endings. Looking back to childhood, he recalls a time when ‘play’ was innocent and unproblematic: when pranks and folly needed no justification, being acceptable as innocuous fun appropriate to the status of a child – ‘A foolish thing was but a toy’ (V.i.388). For the adult however, all that has changed: the irresponsibility of folly in a grown man is regarded as unacceptable, threatening and subversive; the adult who wants to continue playing games is regarded as a criminal and excluded by authority from civilised society, displaced to the margins of social life – ‘Gainst knaves and thieves men shut their gates’ (V.o.392). Adulthood marks an end to the liberated irresponsibility of play. ‘I am sure’, Sir Toby affirms, ‘care’s an enemy to life’ (I.iii.2). Yet the song with which the play closes seems to confirm that ‘care’ is the very condition of ‘life’; and that to be ‘careless’ is not to be ‘carefree’, but to be engaged in a continual, hopeless effort to keep the inevitability of anxiety at a distance. Is life then its own enemy,



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self-divided against its own deepest and most passionate needs? Are play and pleasure locked into an irreconcilable antagonism with the anxiety that threatens them? The one character who professes belief in the necessity of anxiety is the one character who is excluded from the otherwise universal harmony of the play’s conclusion. Malvolio, bitterly disillusioned and ‘notoriously abused’ (V.i.376), has excluded himself from the compact of cheerfulness and gaiety secured by the rest of the cast. Possessed by a vindictive rage, he unites both those who have fooled him and those to whom his own folly has been exposed, in a comprehensive passion of indignation: ‘I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you!’ (V.i.375). He places himself outside the newly integrated community of the play, and casts a shadow over its delicately achieved balance of concord and reconciliation which, we recognise, has been attained only at the cost of ejecting an inassimilable fragment. Even in his absence, his painful alienation and his oath of vengeance brood ominously over the play’s closure; and there at the margins of the drama, his bitter and disappointed presence seems to meet the chastened resignation of the Clown, stranded alone with his own melancholy music, evidently no more a part of the collective celebrations than is Malvolio himself.31 But if care truly is both life’s implacable enemy and life’s inescapable antagonist, then Malvolio can be regarded as a central figure in the play. His fate is to be duped with false hopes and tempted with illusory aspirations; to experience disillusion and disenchantment: and finally to be diagnosed as mad, bound, confined and eventually released to endure the open mockery of his captors and the suppressed amusement of his superiors.32 In the light of Feste’s song, and of the ambivalent nature of the play’s ‘happy ending’, Malvolio can obviously stand as a representative figure in that inhospitable world where even innocent folly is punished and excluded. He is of course a victim of poetic justice, since he was a self-appointed instrument of that universal anxiety, dedicated to the identification of folly in others and the systematic denial of folly in himself. Yet although foolishness, irresponsibility and the hopeless pursuit of perpetual pleasure are all common characteristics – they are certainly central to the character of Orsino, and Olivia is not free from them – Malvolio is the only character to be punished for his participation in a common destiny. He is the scapegoat, the victim who bears away with him the sins of the community.

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Perhaps the ritual is only a game, and Malvolio may be entreated back to join the party. Or perhaps not. As the Clown stands alone, outside the official revelling of a united court, looking towards a disenchanted world where the rain rains every day, Malvolio’s threat of revenge may begin to assume a shadowy substance and a menacing shape, haunting the Western secular dream of materialist freedom. Those who invest their existence in the expectation of perpetual pleasure, guaranteed happiness, the uninterrupted continuance of the game, will always be exposed to the resentment and resistance of those acquainted with anxiety. Although Malvolio is no historical portrait of a puritan, it remains a tempting possibility (pursued by some stage productions) that his banishment and threatened revenge may correspond to the marginalisation and eventual victory of the puritans who were later to fight against the king in the English Civil War. The fact that on that night in Doha Malvolio did not get the chance to utter his desire for vengeance in words, since another vengeance had already been taken in deed, measures the real cultural damage done by Omar’s suicide bomb. For Malvolio is inside the play, and his voice is there to be heard alongside the voices of those who abuse him. The harsh discordance of his cry for revenge, and the long shadow he casts over the play’s final reconciliation, are left as characteristically jarring notes in Shakespeare’s sweet but polyphonic music. The difficulty of maintaining community in such circumstances is not shirked, but confronted and handed over to the audience as a problem of interpretation. Twelfth Night is not a childlike celebration of innocuous play, but a mature and complex drama which explores the conflict between a playfulness that can offend, and a carefulness that can threaten play. Malvolio’s anguish must be heard; but equally the community of the play’s world must find some road to peaceful co-existence. Ultimately the play appeals to justice via a simple notion of fairness which can go very deep, and can form a ground of truth and reconciliation between people who have all suffered enough, if that the injuries be justly weigh’d, that have on both sides pass’d (V.i.366–7).

X How far had Twelfth Night travelled to reach its Caribbean setting in the Doha Players Theatre? Not very far at all, in fact. Traditional nationalistic and newer historicist interpretations locate it some-



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where between the paradigmatic ‘English country house’ and the nowhere of romance. That the play belongs on some kind of borderline is often acknowledged, but this is not thought of geographically, but rather as the border between reality and fantasy, or ‘the borders of wonder and madness’.33 ‘Illyria’ is usually either nowhere in particular, or the Adriatic coast of Greece. Thus the play is often thought to combine its Englishness with a Graeco-Roman ambience. Illyria was in fact somewhere in the Western regions of the Balkan Peninsula, on the coastline now occupied by Croatia, Montenegro and Albania. In the eastern regions of Europe, then, and on a significant borderline between West and East. In Shakespeare’s time this region was a critical border, since it hinged Christian Europe to the Islamic Ottoman Empire.34 In one of the play’s sources, Barnabe Riche’s Riche His Farewell to Militarie Profession (1581), the Duke has ‘spent a yeres service in the warres against the Turke’.35 In Twelfth Night, there are references to the Shah of Persia: Fabian talks of a pension ‘from the Sophy’ (II.v.181), and Sir Toby pretends that Viola has ‘been a fencer to the Sophy’ (III.iv.284). These references probably derived from published accounts of Sir John Shirley’s travels and adventures in the Levant. Shirley acted as a kind of ambassador to the Shah in visits to Moscow, Prague and Rome. Maria describes Malvolio’s smile as containing ‘more lines than is in the new map with the augmentation of the Indies’. (III.ii.75–7) The reference is to a map published in 1599 that gave greater prominence to the East Indies. And just as Othello associates himself both with the ‘turbaned Turk’ and the loyal Venetian who kills him, so Orsino, preparing to sacrifice Viola on the altar of his jealous passion, presents himself as a legendary ‘Egyptian thief’ (V.i.116) who tried to kill the thing he loved. The world of the play is then at some considerable distance from England, and is large enough to encompass allusions to the Islamic world, to Persia and the Ottoman Empire. We may think of Shakespeare as almost synonymous with an Anglophone culture of empire, as Michael Neill puts it: ‘Our ways of thinking about such basic issues as nationality, gender and racial difference are ­inescapably inflected by his writing’.36 Yet here we see Shakespeare setting his play on the border between West and East, Christianity and Islam, and opening doors to both. Today it is manifest that the Shakespeare once dispersed by linguistic imperialism around the globe is also a Shakespeare wholly or partially ‘hybridised’ by

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c­ ontact with other languages and cultures. As Dennis Kennedy puts it, ‘almost from the start of his importance as the idealized English dramatist there have been other Shakespeares, Shakespeares not dependent on English and often at odds with it’.37 Shakespeare in short ‘goes native’ every time he crosses a geographic or national border, and ‘may thus be construed as the repositioned product of a complex of social, cultural and political factors that variously combine under the pressure of colonial, postcolonial and more narrowly national imperatives’.38

XI The objective of terrorism is to terrorise. In the case of the Doha bombing, the point seems to have been to scare expatriate workers into leaving Qatar.39 The Doha players were certainly frightened by the attack, and they testify to a sense of anxiety and suspicion not previously present in their everyday lives. But they have no intention of leaving Qatar, or of abandoning their interest in theatre. On the contrary, the atrocity has brought them closer together into a self-help group dedicated to rebuilding the ruined theatre as a testament to Jonathan Adams. The campaign to raise the funding took some time to build momentum, but took off when students of the Qatar Academy raised 152,000 Qatari Riyal (QR) in memory of their admired and much missed teacher by means of a cultural festival. This was supplemented by a grant of more than 8 million QR from His Highness the Emir Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani. The Qatar Foundation Vice-President for Education, Dr Abdulla Al-Thani, celebrated the way in which students ‘channelled their shock and grief into a fundraising effort in memory of their teacher’ … They will defend our society against intolerance, and they will be the guardians of our nation’s civilised values’.40 My words are … full of peace.41 The Chairman of the Doha Players, Kerry Ruek, said: The rebuilding of the theatre will leave a lasting legacy for the community in memory of Jon. The new theatre will stand as a message of peace and understanding among all peoples of the world.

Dave Garrod, a member of the theatre board, is quoted as saying that the new theatre would be named ‘The Phoenix’.42 If so, the name is beautifully appropriate. The legend of the Phoenix is Egyptian in origin, the sacred firebird of ancient mythology, but it was adopted by Christians and became a figure for the self-immolation and



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resurrection of Christ. Shakespeare’s poem ‘The Phoenix and the Turtle’ locates the scene in Arabia: ‘Let the bird of loudest lay / On the sole Arabian tree …’. Thus Eastern and Western traditions in this emblem lie reciprocally enfolded in a ‘mutual flame’. Jonathan Adams and the theatre he loved perished together. But a new theatre will rise from the ashes of the old, and preserve his memory, let us hope, ‘to eternity’.43

Graham Holderness is the author or editor of 60 books. His key critical works include Shakespeare: The Histories (Bloomsbury, 2000) and The Faith of William Shakespeare (Lion Books, 2016). Works of creative criticism, which are half criticism and half fiction, include Nine Lives of William Shakespeare (Bloomsbury/Arden Shakespeare, 2011) and Tales from Shakespeare: Creative Collisions (Cambridge University Press, 2014). He has also published two novels: The Prince of Denmark (University of Hertfordshire Press, 2001), and the historical fantasy novel Black and Deep Desires: William Shakespeare Vampire Hunter (Top Hat Books, 2015). Forthcoming publications include Samurai Shakespeare (Edward Everett Root). Bryan Loughrey is a recovering academic and now independent scholar who has published extensively on topics related to the early-­ modern period. He has also served over a long period as series editor for Penguin Books, Longman, the British Council, and Berghahn Books. He lived for over 10 years in the Middle East, acting as an advisor to ministries of education and teaching at a range of universities across the region. For the past 30 years he and Graham Holderness have served as the Editors of the journal Critical Survey.

Notes 1. William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, III.i.143. All references are to the Arden Shakespeare edition, edited by J.M. Lothian and T.W. Craik (London: Methuen, 1975, repr. 2007). 2. This is a reconstruction based on the known facts. See ‘Bomber Identified as Egyptian’, The Peninsula, 21 March 2005; ‘Egyptian Bomber Blamed for Qatar Attack’, Breaking News, 20 March 2005, available at (Accessed 30 July 2007); ‘Protest Rally Over Qatar Bombing’, BBC News, 21 March 2005, available at (Accessed 30 July 2007).

212 Graham Holderness and Bryan Loughrey 3. Details are derived from conversations between Bryan Loughrey and members of the Doha Players, March 2007. 4. Extracts from Saleh Mohammed Al-Aoofi, ‘Audio Statement from Al-Qa’eda in Saudi Arabia to Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi in Iraq’. This taped speech ‘according to US intelligence officials, gave a green light to the Doha bombing’. Alexis Debat, ‘The New Head of Jihad Inc.?’, CBS News, 17 March 2005, available at (Accessed 26 July 2007). 5. This is based on recollections from Kerry Ruek, Chair of the Doha Players, in conversation with Bryan Loughrey, March 2007. 6. Extracts from Al-Aoofi, ‘Audio Statement from Al-Qa’eda’. 7. Ibid. 8. Twelfth Night, I.iv.21–2. 9. U.S. Army Captain Eric Clark, quoted in ‘Egyptian Bomber Blamed for Qatar Attack’, Breaking News, 20 March 2005, available at (Accessed 30 July 2007). 10. Kerry Ruek in conversation with Bryan Loughrey. 11. These are words of Julie Hirst, quoted BBC News, 21 March 2005, available at (Accessed 26 July 2007). 12. Ahmed Goudah, quoted in ‘Egyptian Bomber Blamed for Qatar Attack’, Breaking News, 20 March 2005, available at (Accessed 30 July 2007). 13. Details derived from conversations between Bryan Loughrey and members of the Doha Players, March 2007. 14. Gerard Kennedy, quoted in ‘Bomber Identified as Egyptian’, The Peninsula, 21 March 2005. 15. Details derived from conversations between Bryan Loughrey and members of the Doha Players, March 2007. 16. Debat, ‘The New Head of Jihad Inc.?’. Al-Aoofi was killed by Saudi police in Medina in August 2005. See CBS News, 18 August 2005, available at (Accessed 26 July 2007). 17. Jurgen Habermas, quoted in Giovanni Borradori, Philosophy In a Time of Terror: Dialogues With Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003), 25. 18. Jacques Derrida, quoted in Borradori, Philosophy In a Time of Terror, 87. 19. Ibid., 100. 20. Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin, eds, Post-colonial Shakespeares (London: Routledge, 1998), 1. 21. Chinua Achebe, ‘An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness’, in Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays 1965–1987 (Oxford: Heinemann, 1988), 8. 22. Francis Barker and Peter Hulme, ‘“Nymphs and Reapers Heavily Vanish”: the Discursive Con-texts of The Tempest’, in Alternative Shakespeares, ed. John Drakakis (London: Methuen, 1985), 198. 23. Michael Neill, ‘Postcolonial Shakespeare? Writing Away From the Centre’, in Loomba and Orkin, eds, Post-colonial Shakespeares, p. 168.



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24. Martin Walker, ‘Why They Bomb Shakespeare’, Washington Times, 23 March 2005, available at (accessed 26 July 2007). 25. H.J. Ruggles, quoted in Lothian and Craik, eds, Twelfth Night, lii. 26. The Koran, trans. Arthur J. Arberry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 2. 27. Auden and Kott are quoted in Lothian and Craik, eds, Twelfth Night, liv. 28. Akbar said they would not be blamed for killing innocent people at the club, as they were targeting only ‘slags dancing around’. ‘Gang Planned to Blow Up Ministry of Sound Nightclub’, The Times, 25 May 2006, available at [http://www. timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,29389-2196704,00.html] [Accessed 13 December 2007]. 29. See David Carnegie, ‘“Maluolio Within”: Performance Perspectives on the Dark House’, Shakespeare Quarterly 52.3 (Autumn 2001), 393–414. 30. ‘Abuse’ is the term commonly used to describe the torture and humiliation of detainees in the notorious Abu Ghraib military prison in Iraq. 31. See Yu Jin Ko, ‘The Comic Close of Twelfth Night and Viola’s Noli Me Tangere’, Shakespeare Quarterly 48.4 (Winter 1997), 391–405. 32. See Allison P. Hobgood, ‘Twelfth Night’s “Notorious Abuse” of Malvolio: Shame, Humorality and Early Modern Spectatorship’, Shakespeare Bulletin 24.3 (September 2006), 1–22. 33. Frank Kermode, quoted in Lothian and Craik, eds, Twelfth Night, lv. 34. In the 1590s the Turks were launching major campaigns in Hungary. 35. Quoted in Lothian and Craik, eds, Twelfth Night, 157. 36. Neill, ‘Postcolonial Shakespeare?’, 184. 37. Dennis Kennedy, Foreign Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 2. 38. Thomas Cartelli, Repositioning Shakespeare: National Formations, Postcolonial Appropriations (London: Routledge, 1999), 1. 39. ‘The bombing appeared to be directed against Qatar’s pro-western policies and at frightening expatriate workers’. The Guardian, 21 March 2005, ­available at (Accessed 30 July 2007). 40. Qatar Foundation News, 11 October 2006, available at (Accessed 30 July 2007). 41. Twelfth Night, I.v.213. 42. ‘Tributes to Man Who Took Full Force of Blast’, The Times, 21 March 2005. 43. William Shakespeare, ‘The Phoenix and the Turtle’, in William Shakespeare: the Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor with John Jowett and ­William Montgomery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 782. In Twelfth Night (V.i.159), a play in which more than one new person rises from the ashes of the old, the vessel stolen by Antonio is called the Phoenix.

& Chapter 12

Othello in Oman Ah·mad al-Izkī’s Fusion of Shakespeare and Classical Arab Epic Katherine Hennessey

All present gave a shout [in praise of her beauty], while the malicious and ill-natured cried aloud, ‘What a pity that one so beautiful and fair should be wedded to one so black!’1

Shakespeare opts not to stage the wedding of Othello and ­Desdemona: at the opening of Othello the pair have already been married in secret, in a small, understated ceremony. If he had written a nuptial scene, however, Shakespeare might well have planned for the bride’s first appearance in her pomp and finery, walking down the aisle on her father Brabantio’s reluctant arm, to elicit conflicting reactions from the ‘Venetians’ on the stage, as well as from the Jacobean audience in attendance – the admiration of many for Desdemona’s beauty and Othello’s imposing nobility and strength, the envy and racist repugnance of others that the ‘old black ram’ would soon be ‘tupping [the]

Notes for this section begin on page 230.

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white ewe’ (1.1.91–92), perhaps even Desdemona’s rejected suitor Roderigo piteously moaning from a corner of the playing area at Whitehall2 ‘that one so beautiful and so fair should be wedded to one so black’. Yet the lines in the epigraph above come not from a long-lost scene by Shakespeare, but rather from a translation of The Romance of Antar, an elaborate chivalric epic known in Arabic as Sīrat ‘Antar ibn Shaddād,3 which celebrates the exploits of the warrior-poet ‘Antar and his beautiful cousin ‘Abla.4 Though passionately in love, this couple face a formidable obstacle: within his tribe Antar is a racialized outsider, son of an Arab father and a mother who was an Abyssinian slave. His African heritage causes his purebred Arab fellow tribesmen to hold him in disdain, and he spends his youth in slavery, his own father unwilling to claim him as his son. To win first his freedom and his father’s respect, and then his haughty uncle Mālik’s consent to the marriage, Antar must prove himself through a series of daring military exploits. From its origins in the oral poetry of sixth-century Arabia, this epic has acquired centuries’ worth of accretions and emendations,5 but it has retained the central story of a love, like that of Othello and Desdemona, that transcends engrained racial prejudice. A recent work of theatre from Oman, Aḥmad al-Izkī’s al-Layla al-Ḥālika, or The Dark Night, brings Shakespeare’s characters into dialogue, quite literally, with their counterparts from pre-Islamic literature, imagining a series of encounters and conversations between Antar, Abla, Othello, Desdemona and Iago – encounters that ultimately allow the characters to escape the tragic ending of Shakespeare’s play.6 This article argues that the effect of juxtaposing these icons of the Western and Middle Eastern literary canons in a single work is not merely to surprise and entertain by pointing out some unexpected thematic similarities. Rather, the j­ uxtaposition performs a clever and well-placed intervention in ongoing socio-­ political debates on the Arabian Peninsula regarding issues of identity, citizenship and political participation; the play argues for inclusivity and cooperation in the face of deep-seated racism and rising sectarianism. The hybrid nature of al-Izkī’s theatrical project celebrates Oman’s cosmopolitan, multicultural history and its tradition of diplomatic mediation between Eastern and Western powers. His script concludes with an unadulterated happy ending and a message

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of ­cooperation and enlightened openness to cultural difference – positions in harmony with official Sultanate rhetoric. The ending of the 2010 production deviates from the script, however, suggesting a darker warning against the continuing threat of political, ethnic and sectarian divisions across the Gulf – a warning that subsequent events have borne out.

Context: Oman, GCC Theatre and Aḥmad al-Izkī Oman has been ruled since 1749 by the Āl Bū Sa‘īd family; the current Sultan, Qābūs Bin Sa‘īd (usually spelled Qaboos bin Said), deposed his father in a bloodless coup in 1970, and is almost uniformly praised as an enlightened sovereign whose forty-nine-year reign has brought extraordinary stability and prosperity to the Sultanate.7 The country’s achievements under Qaboos have been remarkable: in 2010, the same year in which al-Izkī’s play premiered, the United Nations Development Programme cited Oman as the ‘most improved nation’ in the world in terms of economic and infrastructural development across the preceding four decades.8 Of course, given the oft-cited statistic that when Qaboos wrested control of the government from his father the country had three schools, two hospitals and only six miles of paved road, there was arguably no way to go but up.9 And the prosperity has come at a price in terms of personal freedom and political participation: the Sultan is an absolute monarch who rules by decree, with occasional input from members of a bicameral parliament. Qaboos is head of the armed forces, Minister of Defence, Minister of Foreign Affairs and head of the Omani Central Bank; Omani law forbids criticism of him in any form or forum. A 2012 article in The Economist describes Oman as ‘the world’s most charming police state’.10 One aspect of the Qaboos state’s11 charm offensive is its strong support for culture and the arts, music in particular. In 1985 Qaboos established the Royal Oman Symphony Orchestra (ROSO), an institution absolutely unique in the region, as it admits only Omani performers and provides them with training and lifetime employment.12 Qaboos is also the driving force behind the construction of the magnificent Royal Opera House in Muscat (Illustration 12.1), which opened in late 2011.13 Theatre has likewise blossomed under Qaboos. The dramatic arts have a relatively short history in Oman, beginning, as elsewhere

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Illustration 12.1. Royal Opera House Muscat. Photo credit: Muhammad al-Zubair.

in the Gulf, rather anaemically around the mid-twentieth century in the nation’s few schools and slowly emerging social and literary clubs.14 As principal of the Sa‘īdī school in Muscat between 1956 and 1973, during the reign of Qaboos’ father and predecessor Sa‘īd ibn Taymūr, Ṭawfīq ‘Azīz presided over the annual end-of-year celebrations held in the school’s courtyard, in which students dramatized stories taken from their school texts, and he recalls the rudimentary, ad hoc resources available in that era for theatre activities: ‘Because we had no stage, we pushed desks together and covered them with fabric. We also connected two classrooms together so that the entrance could be used as backstage areas’.15 In the decades following Qaboos’ accession in 1970, however, Oman witnessed a boom in school construction and attendance rates and a dedicated integration of drama into the educational curriculum: Omani theatre historian Abd-Elkarim Bin Ali Bin Jawad notes that by the mid-1990s it was common practice for Omani students to perform plays by Molière, Shakespeare and Ṭawfīq al-Ḥakīm.16 The Sultan has also provided moral and financial support to theatrical troupes and initiatives like the Omani Youth Theatre’s well-funded and technically advanced production of The Merchant of Venice in 1980, a centrepiece of the celebrations of the tenth anniversary of the Sultan’s accession,17 and today the country has more than thirty professional theatre troupes, many of them government-sponsored.18 There is thus a degree of official encouragement for the performing arts in Oman, and one might extend that observation to the Gulf as a whole. The six member states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) – Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia – host annual, biennial and occasional

218 Katherine Hennessey

theatre festivals, individually and collectively. These include the Gulf ­T heatre Festival, the Omani Theatre Festival, Sharjah’s ‘Theatre Days’, Dubai’s Youth Theatre Festival and the Dammam Theatre Festival in Saudi Arabia, to cite just a few examples. The GCC states also regularly send troupes to participate in international festivals and competitions. But this support coexists with an uneasy suspicion that the genre is potentially subversive, proto-revolutionary. As critics like Nehad Selaiha have demonstrated,19 public performances throughout the Arabian Gulf are often subjected to multiple layers of censorship, both external and self-imposed. Political and even social commentary thus tends to be oblique and coded – as this article argues is the case with The Dark Night. Al-Izkī created The Dark Night for the 2010 Gulf Youth Theatre Festival, hosted that year by Qatar at the National Theatre in Doha.20 Like the festival’s contributions from Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, the Omani play was filmed and made available online as part of a cooperative documentation and digitization proj­ ect called ‘Gulf Stage’, a collaboration between the British Council, the Qatari Ministry of Culture, Arts, and Heritage, the Qatar Foundation and the British-based online performance recording platform Digital Theatre.21 Though al-Izkī is better known in Oman as a scriptwriter for television than for his work in theatre (he is also a staff member of the scripts department of Oman’s General Authority for Radio and Television), he proudly describes himself as kātib drāmī (a ‘dramatist’ or ‘playwright’), and he voices staunch support for the stage as an educational forum. In particular, al-Izkī argues that the theatre holds great potential for teaching Omanis about their own national history, and urges writers and theatre practitioners to revive historical figures on the stage. ‘Don’t let your history books gather dust on the shelves,’ he exhorts. ‘We must dust them off, and present our history to our audience and to the world.’22 Historical dramas once illuminated for Omani audiences the lives of the figures who steered the great ship of the nation,23 like al-Wārith ibn Kā‘b, the Ibadhi imam (r. 795–806) whose reign ‘marks the beginning of a golden age’ in medieval Oman.24 Al-Izkī laments that such dramas have fallen out of fashion in recent decades among Omani playwrights and theatre troupes.25 Al-Izkī’s recourse to the character of Antar seems inspired by this passion for Omani history, for Antar is in fact a historical figure from

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the Arabian Peninsula, ‘Antara ibn Shaddād al-‘Absī (ca. 525–608 ce, Figure 2). Antar was both a warrior and a poet:26 his finest qasīda (ode) is one of the seven Mu‘allaqāt, the pinnacles of pre-Islamic poetry (the ‘Hanging Poems’, so known because according to legend they were embroidered in gold thread on panels of linen suspended from the Ka‘ba in Mecca). It is impossible at this remove to filter out the historical facts of Antar’s life from the subsequent centuries’ accretions of myth and legend. The epic romance that bears his name ran to thirty-two ­volumes when it was published in Cairo in 1889, and it claims, among other things, that his sword was forged from a meteor that fell to earth, and that he conquered Yemen, Ethiopia and Sudan. But it is precisely this fusion of opposites that interests al-Izkī: Antar is not only half-African and half-Arab, but also poet and warrior, slave and conqueror, man and legend. Similarly, as a ‘Moor’, a vague and capacious designation in Elizabethan England,27 Shakespeare’s ­Othello could be either Arab or African, or – like Antar – both. And to this slippage between Arab and African identity, the Shakespearean intertext adds another layer of fusion: East and West.

Illustration 12.2. Nineteenth-century Egyptian depiction of Antar, left, and Abla, right. Source: Wikipedia (out of copyright).

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The Dark Night: 2010 Performance As noted, al-Izkī’s play brings Desdemona, Othello and Iago into dialogue with Abla and Antar, an astute juxtaposition that highlights the thematic similarities between the two texts: the love story between a young woman of social standing and a man whose physical appearance marks him as foreign to her community; her father’s disdain for the match; the hero’s martial prowess and its connection to both his status within the community and the possibility of marriage with his beloved; and the interrogation of pervasive racial prejudice.28 Al-Izkī is clearly intrigued by these textual parallels, and the 2010 performance, directed by ‘Abd al-Ghafūr al-Balūshī, provides visual markers of them.29 The actors playing the roles of Othello and Antar are of similar build, and both appear on stage in stylized military uniforms, each with the top half of his face, from forehead to nose, painted white on one side and black on the other (Illustrations 12.3 and 12.4). The contrasting colours serve as a visual representation of hybrid identity and – since Antar’s make-up is white on the left and black on the right while Othello’s is the opposite – as a suggestion that these characters are mirror images, despite their temporal, geographic and cultural differences.30 Conversely, Desdemona’s and Abla’s costumes stress their contrasting origins. Abla wears a stylized dar‘a (traditional Bedouin woman’s dress) in black and silver, and over it a jewelled orange shift. Her headdress is black with a twisted ‘iqāl (cord) of red cloth, crowned by an intricate piece of silver jewellery with a row of pendants across her forehead (Illustration 12.5). She also sports a

Illustrations 12.3 and 12.4. Al-Layla al-Ḥālika in performance: Othello left, Antar above.

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Illustration 12.5. Al-Layla al-Ḥālika in performance: Abla.

Bedouin tattoo on her chin: a vertical line with a row of three dots on either side, an indicator of her tribal identity. Desdemona, on the other hand, is dressed in lilac silk, with puffed sleeves and an elegant black hat. The style of her dress is Victorian rather than Jacobean, suggesting that director al-Bulūshī aimed to evoke an idea of ‘History’ rather than to faithfully recreate a particular historical period. Long blond hair hangs to her shoulders, a visible reminder of her European rather than Arab pedigree. The play’s form mirrors its hybrid content. The online video begins with a set of credits, standard white text on black background, which scroll to the sound of an eighteenth-century horn concerto (again, a generically ‘Western classical’ rather than particularly J­acobean sound),31 into which, after a few bars, enter the contrasting strains of an Arabic melody played on the oud – an audio fore­shadowing of the play’s literary mash-up. Visually, the production is part experimental theatre, part multimedia composite, as it uses images and video clips projected onto a large background screen to set scenes and to further the narrative. The settings include a Bedouin tent, which serves as background when Antar is introduced (Illustration 12.6), and a medieval or early modern stone castle, which the script refers to as ‘Othello’s palace’.32 Several of the video clips are taken from feature films – a striking mélange of classic Arab cinema and recent Hollywood which reinforces the production’s hybrid East-West aesthetic.33 At one point, a segment from Act 3 Scene 3 of O ­ thello that

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Illustration 12.6. A Bedouin tent projected onto a screen behind the actors playing Antar, his father and his uncle.

was pre-recorded by the Omani actors is projected onto the screen rather than acted on the stage, so the theatrical performance bleeds into the cinematic experience and vice versa. The Arabic adjective ḥālika in the play’s title (al-Layla al-Ḥālika) actually means ‘pitch black’ rather than merely dark, and the production’s lighting is appropriately low and atmospheric. The actors perform for the most part in heavily filtered and coloured light and shadow, with occasional flashes of light illuminating the stage at crucial moments (a practical choice allowing the audience to better see the action, and a reminder, perhaps, of a characteristic element of pre-Islamic poetry, the ‘lightning scene’, in which the poet describes the experience of watching a distant lightning storm at night).34 The darkness attunes the audience’s ear to the play’s auditory pyrotechnics: Antar’s occasional sonorous recitation of Arabic poetry on the classical themes of nobility, warrior prowess and honour, and love.35 The play opens with a series of scenes showing each male protagonist in his expected ambience: Antar in a Bedouin encampment with his father Shaddād, his uncle Mālik and his brother Shaybūb; Othello36 on a battlefield with Iago. Each set of characters fights a bloody battle against their respective enemies; Antar’s prowess wins his freedom and his father’s recognition, and we learn from a brief aside that Iago secretly covets Desdemona.

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In the next two mirror-image scenes, these two worlds mys­ teriously intertwine. Antar mistakes a veiled Desdemona for Abla, reciting love poetry to her before both realize the error. Abla similarly misidentifies Othello as Antar. Perplexed by the appearance of this mysterious woman and concerned by Desdemona’s absence, an agitated Othello asks Iago to explain what has happened: ‘Something strange is happening to my brain: I feel as though our time and our lives have changed into something different. We are no longer ourselves, and Desdemona there isn’t Desdemona. Tell me what has happened!’37 (The lines suggest an allusion to Othello’s ‘trance’/ epileptic fit in Othello 1.4.) Iago suggests that Desdemona may have fled with Cassio, provoking Othello still further. The most exciting aspect of this play is al-Izkī’s imagination of the conversations that take place between these displaced characters.38 Abla swiftly perceives Iago’s untrustworthiness and cautions Othello against him. When Othello defends his friend, she warns him once again to beware, and departs on her own to search for Antar. And Antar, the great romantic hero who has courageously endured trial after trial to win Abla, here unexpectedly finds himself attracted to Desdemona, and begins to recite his poetry to her. These are the opening lines of his famous mu‘allaqa, in which the poet describes his return to Abla’s dwelling place after her departure:39 ْ ‫هلْ غاد َر ال ُّشعرا ُء‬ ‫من متردَّم‬ ‫أم هلْ عرفتَ الدا َر بع َد توهم‬ ‫يا دا َر عَبلَةَ بِال َجوا ِء تَكَلَّمي‬ ‫صباحا ً دا َر عَبلَةَ َواِسلَمي‬ َ ‫َوعَمي‬ Have the poets left anywhere in need of patching? Or did you, after imaginings, recognize her abode?    Oh abode of ‘Abla in al-Jiwa’i, speak! Morning greetings,    abode of ‘Abla, peace!40

Al-Izkī’s play, however, stages a Freudian slip in which Antar replaces ‘dar ‘Abla’ with ‘Desdemona’ when reciting the famous lines. He instantly chastises himself for his faithlessness: ‘That was wrong,’ he cries, ‘… What’s Abla’s is Abla’s, and can’t be dedicated to anyone else – even you, Desdemona! What I should have said was …’41 at which point the audience hears a reverberating recorded

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recitation of the original verses, accompanied by a melody on the oud. As the recording plays, however, Antar and Desdemona silently lock eyes, the romantic strains of the oud suggesting that Antar, at least, is torn between the reaffirmation of his devotion to Abla and a barely repressed desire for Desdemona. Audiences would not be expecting this frailty from the great romantic hero, nor is the image of a virile Omani actor expressing an intense and forbidden physical attraction towards the young actress standing next to him a common one in the conservative context of Arabian Gulf theatre. Most provocatively, however, the play suggests that Desdemona’s Western allure makes her a tempting alternative to Antar’s native-born Bedouin princess. The script makes surprising choices about gender roles as well. For example, while most recitations of Antar’s poetry are performed by the actor who plays him, the actress playing Abla also declaims the opening lines from one of Antar’s odes. Most striking is al-­ Izkī’s final scene, in which Iago attempts – with some success – to convince Antar that the absent Abla has fallen in love with Othello, just as in Shakespeare’s play he makes Othello suspect Desdemona and Cassio. His aim, as he explains in an aside, is to provoke Antar to kill Othello, thereby leaving Desdemona free for him to claim.

Illustration 12.7. Al-Layla al-Ḥālika in performance: Iago in silhouette, Antar right, Othello entering left, behind the screen.

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Iago, Antar and Desdemona act the first part of this scene in front of a translucent screen, which is backlit in bright orange to suggest the breaking dawn, reducing the characters to silhouettes as in a shadow puppet play – a reminder that Iago has thus far succeeded in pulling the other characters’ strings (Illustration 12.7). Confident that he has successfully manipulated Antar, Iago confesses his love to Desdemona, claiming that he has served Othello just to remain close to her. During Iago’s speech, the audience sees the silhouettes of Othello and Abla slowly crossing the stage from behind the screen. When Othello and Abla appear and rejoin the others, Othello confronts Iago, who tries to convince Antar that his accusations against Abla are just. In the face of Antar’s anger, doubt and jealousy, Abla and Desdemona make common cause; both call Iago a despicable liar and urge Antar not to believe him. Othello then adds his voice to that of the two women, so that all three are standing together against Iago. Convinced at last by this trio, Antar rejects Iago’s insinuations, thus saving himself and Abla – and also Othello and Desdemona – from Shakespeare’s tragic ending. As the heroes draw their swords and a frantic Iago pleads for forgiveness, the stage goes dark. When the lights come up, to the consternation of both couples, Iago has vanished, his villainous, disembodied cackle reverberating over the theatre’s sound system. The performance concludes on this note: the lovers are reunited, but the divisive threat remains.

Socio-political Allegories and Sobering Realities What does a performance like this signify, in Oman where al-Izkī wrote it and in Doha where the actors performed it? I believe the play contains two interpretive layers, one closely connected to its pre-Islamic source text, the other arising from the fusion of that text and Shakespeare. The first layer provides a subtle commentary on the relationship of Arab citizens to their leaders; the latter warns of the threats posed by sectarian strife and other forms of socio-political division. The first layer reads the pre-Islamic epic as an allegory for contemporary Arab/Gulf politics. There is precedent within Arabic literature for using pre-Islamic characters as a symbol of a marginalized populace, whose clamours to be heard by those in power go tragically unheeded. For example, Egyptian poet Āmal Dunqūl, in poems

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like Al-bukāʾ bayna yaday Zarqāʾ al-Yamāmah’ (Weeping in Zarqāʾ al-Yamāmah’s Hands, 1987), used the title character – a blue-eyed seer of pre-Islamic legend whose tribal leaders ignored her warnings of an enemy attack, precipitating her and their own destruction – to symbolize a citizenry crying out in vain for influence over national affairs.42 Antar particularly lends himself to this type of allegorical interpretation, marginalized as he is by his father and uncle, who are eager to exploit his prowess in battle but reluctant to recognize him as their kin or free him from his status as a slave. Abla thus becomes a symbol of the nation, and the temporary separation of the lovers and their determined search for each other suggests the unfed popular hunger for greater political participation and autonomy. In al-Izkī’s play Antar proves himself worthy of such responsibilities: he is attracted to Desdemona’s beauty but overcomes those desires and remains faithful, just as he governs his murderous rage at Abla’s supposed betrayal, instead choosing to reject Iago’s insidious and divisive rhetoric. Al-Izkī’s script concludes with the joyous reunion of both c­ ouples, culminating in Othello’s final line: ‘How I love you, how I love you, my dearest Desdemona! And if ever I cease to love you, the world will have returned to chaos (fawḍā)’. This is, on one hand, a relatively straightforward translation of Shakespeare’s ‘Excellent wretch! Perdition catch my soul / But I do love thee! And when I love thee not / Chaos is come again’ (Othello 3.3.90–92).43 But it is also a reference to a return to stability from the threat of social and political upheaval, for which the Arabic word fawḍā (chaos) often serves as shorthand. The Dark Night gives the lie to the ‘après moi, le deluge’ rhetoric repeatedly adopted by autocratic leaders, since the autocratic elite represented by Antar’s father and uncle cannot protect the tribe/ nation from the fawḍā of external threats. Only the hero – the brave and active citizen, loyal to his own nation no matter what deceptions or temptations other geographies may offer – can stave off the chaos. (As noted above, al-Balūshī’s production omits the couples’ final, joyful lines, and allows Iago to slip away from the angry heroes – a darker ending that actually stages chaos, rather than merely alluding to it.) The Shakespearean elements of The Dark Night serve a different, though complementary purpose: they remind local and regional audiences on the Arabian Peninsula of the merits of cosmopolitanism and acceptance of difference. The foundational concept of

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the play – that characters from Shakespeare and from pre-Islamic literature can be brought together in fruitful dialogue – serves as a subtle riposte to a monolithic, ideologically stifling set of identity constructs, rooted in and/or strengthened by a resurgent Salafism, which institute discriminatory hierarchies of race, sect and gender and evaluate human character in terms of adherence to a rigidly defined system of religious beliefs and practices.44 Such constructs effectively equate being Arab with being Muslim (and following a particular madhhab of Sunni Islam at that) and vice versa, relegating groups like Shi‘a Arabs or African Muslims to secondary status, or writing them out of official accounts of national tradition and identity, as Lawrence Potter argues the Gulf monarchies have done to their Shi‘a minorities.45 These constructs underpin the region’s segregation of its residents along gender, ethnic, linguistic and sectarian lines: women from men, Shi‘a from Sunni, foreign residents from Gulf citizens and so on. They inspire divisive rhetoric like that of certain hardline Islamists in Saudi Arabia who have referred to minorities as ‘a poison in the body of the umma’.46 In their most extreme and violent form, such identity constructs can support the ethnic and cultural ‘purification’ and homogenization attempted by groups like the self-styled Islamic State. Recuperating and celebrating pre-Islamic literature can help contemporary Gulf artists to challenge these axio­ matic, fundamentalist sectarian politics; appropriating pre-­Islamic texts is one way to sidestep – and hence perhaps think past – the Sunni–Shi‘a divide. And al-Izkī’s play takes this process a step further by integrating Shakespeare’s characters as well, challenging notions of an East-West ‘clash of civilizations’ by positing Antar and Othello as analogues, mirror images, who share a common humanity that transcends their spatial and temporal divides. Is this a message that could not be overtly spoken in Oman? My understanding of the socio-political configuration of the contemporary Gulf suggests that this play could be staged, accepted and even praised in Oman, where Sultan Qaboos describes his nation as tolerant and open-minded, ‘a model for others to follow … adopting every new enlightened idea, benefitting from sciences and new technology and at the same time always preserving … [their] traditions and authentic customs’.47 Though this description is arguably more aspirational than accurate, it suggests that at least the second interpretive layer in al-Izkī’s content harmonizes with official Sultanate rhetoric.

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As scholar Mohammed al-Awawdah among others has argued, the Ibadhi school of Islam – established before the Sunni–Shi‘a rift – which predominates in Oman is surprisingly tolerant of sectarian difference.48 And while contemporary Oman cannot be held up as a shining exemplar of ethnic inclusivity or racial equality,49 its mid-­seventeenth to early-nineteenth-century history as a maritime empire, with trading interests in Persia and possessions in Zanzibar and across East Africa, in the Comoros and in B ­ aluchistan, has given the Omani population an ethnic diversity unique on the Arabian Peninsula. As Marc Valeri notes, one of the signature achievements of the Sultan’s long reign has been ‘the imposition of the idea of an Omani nation as the horizon of all social and political actors’ strategies, as well as a collective framework of belonging’ for Omani citizens,50 irrespective of creed or ethnicity. It is significant, however, that this play was staged not in Oman but in Qatar, at a GCC theatre festival, in which the other participating nations have invested much more heavily than Oman in the kinds of identity politics previously referred to. It thus spoke directly to a wider regional audience – to viewers from Saudi Arabia, for example, whose hardline Islamists condemn Oman’s Ibadhi sect as deviant, even heretical; from Bahrain, where longstanding divisions between Sunna and Shi’a would boil over the following year in the Arab Spring protests; from Kuwait, where political scientist Rania al-Nakib has argued that the state-supported educational system is deliberately designed to ‘mirror and reinforce societal divisions between Kuwaitis and expatriates, men and women, bedouins and ḥaḍar [townspeople], Sunnis and Shias, and upper and middle/lower classes’.51 In its fusion of Shakespeare and pre-Islamic epic, The Dark Night offers an example of fruitful East-West collaboration. Though it makes no direct reference to sectarian difference, all four of the play’s protagonists interact on a footing of mutual respect, which the villain Iago attempts to disrupt and throw into murderous chaos to further his own ends – thereby providing a theatrical analogue for regional questions of coexistence and cooperation vs. sectarian fragmentation. Given Antar’s and Othello’s heroic status and their ethnic backgrounds, the play also provides a celebration of Oman’s unique ethnic diversity, born of centuries of maritime trade with southeast Asia, Persia and particularly Africa, and a salutary caution against engrained racism and discrimination in the rest of the Gulf.52

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These intertwined messages about the need for greater inclusivity, on both the political and social levels, seem prescient in the light of recent history. Though not as dramatically as in Bahrain or Yemen, protest and criticism came to the fore in Oman during the Arab Spring uprisings. Citizens’ anger stemmed largely from un- and under-employment, particularly among the young; from the perceived corruption of the political elite (though most protesters were quick to point out that they were not aiming their critiques at the Sultan himself ); from the growth of income inequality; and from the limits to political participation. Protests continued well after 2011, despite harassment and intimidation by security forces; a 2013 nationwide teachers’ strike met with repressive measures, and in 2014 Ṭālib al-Ma‘āmarī, an outspoken member of the Consultative Council who had supported the questioning of Omani ministers suspected of corruption and participated in an anti-industrial-­ pollution protest in the province of Liwa, was sentenced to three years in jail for ‘undermining the status and prestige of the state’. As one report notes, the repeated smearing of protesters as ‘delinquents’ and ‘vandals’ by senior officials, the army’s attempts to violently control demands, the manipulation of local identities and tribal issues as a ‘divide-andrule’ technique and the resulting deepening polarization based on religion and mutual prejudices related to ethno-linguistic identities have reduced the population’s trust in the polity …53

The response of the Omani government, in short, promoted precisely the sectarian and ethnic fractures that al-Izkī’s play had cautioned against, and for which it proposed an alternative model. Al-Izkī’s drama takes its diverse cast of characters – men and women, of Arab, African and Western origin – and bands them together against Iago, against his divisive, deceptive, destructive ­rhetoric. The mutual understanding that al-Izkī’s Antar, Othello, Abla and Desdemona reach saves them all from a tragic ending. In 2010, The Dark Night’s message of tolerance, respect, co­operation and its rejection of discriminatory hierarchies of race, sect and gender was primarily directed from Oman outwards, towards the rest of the Gulf. But those watching the play online today may well find that message as pertinent and as urgent for Oman itself.

230 Katherine Hennessey

Katherine Hennessey is Assistant Dean for Curriculum and Assistant Professor of English at the American University of Kuwait. Her scholarship focuses on the performing arts in the Arabian Gulf, Yemen, and Ireland. She is the author of Shakespeare on the Arabian Peninsula (Palgrave 2018) and director of the short documentary Shakespeare in Yemen, which was screened in June 2018 at the Signature Theatre in New York City and at the 2018 MESA FilmFest. She is the recipient of a year-long NEH Fellowship for her next book project, entitled Theatre on the Arabian Peninsula (Routledge 2020).

Notes Versions of this article appear in Critical Survey 28.3 and in Chapter 6 of the author’s Shakespeare on the Arabian Peninsula (Palgrave 2018). 1. Quoted in Terrick Hamilton’s translation, entitled Antar, a Bedoueen Romance (London: John Murray, 1820), 394. 2. The first recorded performance of Shakespeare’s Othello occurred on 1 November 1604, in the Banqueting House of King James’ palace at Whitehall, according to the Accounts of the Master of the Revels. 3. Terrick Hamilton translated the opening books of Sīrat ʻAntar, as noted above; the complementary segments of the latter part of Antar’s adventures and the account of his death are available in H.T. Norris’s translation (Oxford: Aris and Philips, 1980). W.A. Clouston translated an abridged version of Sīrat ʻAntar in 1881, in an anthology entitled Arabian Poetry: For English Readers (reprinted by Kessinger in 2010). For an enlightening structural and thematic analysis of the tale, and an intriguing theory on the mirroring of Antar’s adventures by the epic’s minor and sometimes villainous characters, see Peter Heath, The Thirsty Sword: Sīrat ʻAntar and the Arabic Popular Epic (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1996). 4. An orthographic note: in Arabic, Antar is referred to interchangeably as ‘Antar’ and ‘Antara’ (sometimes transliterated ‘Antarah’), and the names of Antar and Abla both begin with an initial ‘ayn, usually transliterated with ‘. For easier legibility I have dropped the initial ‘ayn from the protagonists’ names after this first instance. 5. According to literary tradition, the poet al-Asma’ī in the court of Harūn al-Rashīd (Baghdad, 786–809) was the first to transcribe the various tales associated with Antar and to present them in unified form as the Sīrat ‘Antar ibn Shaddād [The Epic of Antar]. Throughout the subsequent centuries more legends and stories were added to this text, which was published in both Beirut (1871) and Cairo (1889). 6. A full recording of this performance, in Arabic without subtitles, is available on Digital Theatre’s ‘Gulf Stage’ website: http://www.digitaltheatre.com/collections/ gulfstage/oman. 7. See David Commins, The Gulf States: A Modern History (London: I.B. Tauris, 2012).

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8. ‘2010 Human Development Report: The Real Wealth of Nations: Pathways to Human Development’, United Nations Development Programme (New York: Palgrave, 2010), 29. 9. For the statistic, see, for instance, Katja Niethammer’s profile of ‘The Persian Gulf States’, in The Middle East, ed. Ellen Lust (New York: Sage, 2014), 13th ed., 723. 10. ‘Waking Up Too’, The Economist, 23 June 2012 (print and online). 11. The phrase ‘the Qaboos state’ is Marc Valeri’s, used in his Oman: Politics and Society in the Qaboos State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 12. More information about ROSO is available at ‘About Oman: Royal Oman Symphony Orchestra’, Oman Tours (http://www.oman-tours.com/about-oman/ culture-overview-crafts-architecture-music-arts/musicdance/royal-symphony-­ orchestra-oman/) and ‘Muscat Royal Opera House and Royal Oman Symphony Orchestra’, Gulf Art Guide: Contemporary Visual Arts in the Arabian Peninsula (http:// gulfartguide.com/muscat/muscat-opera-house-oman-symphony-­orchestra/). The composition of ROSO is usefully contrasted to that of, for example, the Qatar Philharmonic, whose membership is dominated by specially recruited internationals (cf. ‘Meet the Orchestra’, qatarphilharmonicorchestra.org). 13. For more on which, see my articles, ‘The Inaugural Season of the Royal Opera House Muscat’, Portal 9 1 (2012, online), and ‘All the World’s a Stage Designed by Zaha Hadid: How the Gulf’s New Mega-theatres Attempt to Promote “Global” Identities’, in Representing the Nation, ed. Pamela Erskine-Loftus, Mariam al-Mulla and Victoria Hightower (Routledge, 2016) 147–161. 14. Habib Ghuloom al-Attar, The Development of Theatrical Activity in the Gulf Region (Abu Dhabi: UAE Ministry of Culture, Youth, and Community Development, 2009), 60–61. 15. Quoted in Abd-Elkarim Bin Ali Bin Jawad, ‘Oman’, trans. Yacob Idris, in The World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre. Vol. 4: The Arab World, ed. Don Rubin with Ghassan Maleh, Farouk Ohan, Samir Sarhan and Ahmed Zaki (London: Routledge, 1999), 182. 16. Abd-Elkarim Bin Ali Bin Jawad, ‘Oman’, 182. 17. Ibid., 183–84. 18. This count is provided by Aḥmad al-Izkī, ‘Al-tārikh al-‘umānī wa al-masraḥ’ [Omani History and the Theatre], Al-Ḥadath, Issue 3, Omani Ministry of Heritage and Culture, 6 December 2013, 15. It matches what I have seen touted in official Omani government publications. Some of the more prominent Omani troupes are al-Sahwā‘, al-Rustāq, the Salalah Theatre Troupe, al-Dān and Fikr wa Fann. 19. For an analysis of why theatre ‘retains its marginal status in the culture of the Gulf states, remains tame and toothless and keeps going round in circles’, see Nehad Selaiha, ‘Theatre in the Gulf’, Al-Ahram Weekly, 16–22 April 2009 (online). 20. This was the ninth in the series of Gulf Youth Theatre Festivals, but the first ever to be filmed. 21. See http://www.digitaltheatre.com/collections/gulfstage. This project, which allowed aspiring Gulf filmmakers and videographers to train with their UK counterparts, adds a further layer of East-West hybridity to the production and the afterlife of al-Izkī’s play. 22. Al-Izkī, ‘Al-tārikh al-‘umānī wa al-masraḥ’, 15. All translations from Arabic, unless otherwise noted, are mine.

232 Katherine Hennessey 23. Al-Izkī remembers a historical play entitled Riḥlat safīnat al-sultāna [The Voyage of the Ship of the Sultanate]. 24. Calvin H. Allen Jr., Oman: The Modernization of the Sultanate (London: Routledge, 2016 [1987]). 25. Al-Izkī, ‘Al-tārikh al-‘umānī wa al-masraḥ’, 15. 26. See, for example, the separate entries for ‘Antara ibn Shaddad as Historical Character and as Poet by scholar Driss Cherkaoui in Medieval Islamic Civilization: An Encyclopedia, ed. Josef W. Meri (London: Routledge, 2005). 27. ‘Moor’ in Shakespeare’s day primarily indicated North Africans, but could also be used as a nebulous, catch-all term for Turks, Persians and even First Peoples in the New World. For more on this, see the introduction to Virginia Mason Vaughan, Othello: A Contextual History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 28. These similarities should not, of course, be misinterpreted as signs of filiation; Shakespeare’s primary source for Othello is ‘Un Capitano Moro’ [A Moorish Captain], a tale from sixteenth-century Italian author Cinthio’s Hecatommithi (1565). This article makes no claims that either Cinthio or Shakespeare knew or drew upon the legends of Antar, though al-Izkī himself has raised this possibility, at least rhetorically (see note 30). 29. The text began as a radio drama entitled Rīyāḍ al-‘Āshiqīn [Lovers’ Gardens], which al-Izkī rewrote for theatrical performance. See Hājar Muḥammad Bū Ghanīmī’s interview with al-Izkī, ‘Aḥmad al-Izkī li-ashri‘a’, in the Omani daily al-Waṭan, 1 January 2012, http://www.alwatan.com/graphics/2012/01Jan/1.1/ dailyhtml/ashreea.html#3. 30. In the interview with Bū Ghānimī, al-Izkī himself cites a number of these similarities: Othello’s and Antar’s ‘dark complexions’ and ‘physical strength’, their status as noble warriors and the various adventures they undergo as a result of love, asking, ‘Is it not possible, then, that Othello is Antar, and that Shakespeare plucked him out of his own story and dropped him into the plot of Othello?’ Ibid. 31. My thanks to Claire Bardelmann for her assistance in identifying the time period of this piece. 32. Aḥmad al-Izkī, al-Layla al-Ḥālika (unpublished playscript, 2010), 8. I am grateful to Hissa al-Badi for providing me with a copy of this script and for her comments on a draft of this article. 33. The play opens with a clip from a cinematic portrayal of a Bedouin battle, and just prior to Othello’s first entrance the audience sees a clip of a Crusader battle scene featuring Orlando Bloom, from Ridley Scott’s 2005 Kingdom of Heaven. There is a well-known Egyptian cinematic adaptation of the Romance of Antar from 1961, entitled Antar Bin Shaddad (rendered in English as Antar the Black Prince), directed by Nīazī Muṣṭafa and starring Muṣṭafa’s wife Kawka as Abla and Farīd Shawqī, famed for his roles as an action hero in Egyptian cinema, as Antar (Shawqī plays the role in blackface). The film is regularly screened on Arab satellite channels and would have been an obvious choice for the background video montage, but director al-Balūshī does not seem to have incorporated it into his production – perhaps because the cheery primary colours of the Egyptian film did not suit the chiaroscuro atmosphere of the play.

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34. See Ali Ahmad Hussein, The Lightning-Scene in Ancient Arabic Poetry: Function, Narration and Idiosyncrasy in Pre-Islamic and Early Islamic Poetry (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz Verlag, 2009). 35. Some of these lines come from those of Antar’s texts that have come down to us, including his mu‘allaqa; others I have been unable to trace. 36. The script calls Othello ‘Ūtayl and Desdemona Daydamūna, following the rendering of Shakespeare’s characters’ names in the French text from which Khalīl Muṭrān produced his 1912 ‘Arabizing’ translation; for clarity of reference I have maintained the Shakespearean spellings in this article. The translations of Shakespeare’s text used in the play are Iraqi-Palestinian scholar Jabra Ibrahim Jabra’s (1978), with minor edits by al-Izkī. 37. Al-Izkī, al-Layla al-Ḥālika, 9. 38. For another recent theatrical ‘mash-up’ of pre-Islamic literature and Shakespeare, see Syrian playwright Ramzi Choukair’s Al-Zīr Sālim wa-l-‘Amir Hamlit, performed most recently in Paris in 2015 (http://ramzichoukair.com/theatre/). 39. Traditionally, the pre-Islamic qasīdah has three parts: the nasīb, the raḥīl and the fakhr. The nasīb, of which these lines are an example, ‘deals with elegiac motifs such as ruined abodes and deals with amatory themes such as unrequited love’, while the raḥīl traces a journey through the desert and the fakhr glorifies the poet and/or his tribe. See the introduction to Akiko Motoyoshi Sumi, Description in Classical Arabic Poetry (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 1. 40. Pre-Islamic poetry is notoriously difficult to translate; this lovely rendering is Michael Sells’, in Desert Tracings: Six Classic Arabian Odes (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1989). 41. Al-Izkī, al-Layla al-Ḥālika, 13. 42. The victorious enemy massacred all the men in her tribe, and blinded and cruci­ fied Zarqāʾ. In another intriguing parallel between pre-Islamic literature and Shakespeare, the enemy tribe carries trees in front of them to mask their progress; like Macbeth unable to conceive of Birnam Wood coming to Dunsinane, the tribe’s leaders believe Zarqāʾ’s prophecy to be an impossibility. 43. This is a direct citation of Jabra (1978) as noted above, though al-Izkī changes Jabra’s al-kawn (the universe) to al-‘ālam (the world) and interpolates ‘my dearest Desdemona’. 44. For a study of the increasingly fraught sectarian and ethnic tensions in the region, see for example Sectarian Politics in the Gulf (Summary Report, Center for International and Regional Studies at Georgetown University in Qatar, 2012); Mahjoob Zweiri and Mohammed Zahid, Religion, Ethnicity, and Identity Politics in the Persian Gulf (Athens: Research Institute for European and American Studies, 2007); Frederick M. Wehrey, Sectarian Politics in the Gulf: From the Iraq War to the Arab Uprisings (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014); and Saeed Shehabi, ‘The Role of Religious Ideology in the Expansionist Policies of Saudi Arabia’, in Kingdom without Borders: Saudi Arabia’s Political, Religious, and Media Frontiers, ed. Madawi al-Rasheed (London: Hurst, 2008), 183–198. 45. Lawrence J. Potter, introduction to Sectarian Politics in the Gulf (Summary Report, Center for International and Regional Studies at Georgetown University in Qatar, 2012), 1.

234 Katherine Hennessey 46. Quoted in Abdullah al-Rashid, ‘The Gulf Muslim Brotherhood’s Position on Minorities: The Case of Saudi Arabia’, in Sectarian and Ethnic Diversity in the Gulf, Al-Mesbar Center, 1 September 2014 (online). 47. Qabūs bin Sa‘īd, Sultan of Oman, ‘Speech at the Opening of the 5th Term of the Council of Oman, 3lst October 2011’, Omani Ministry of Information, 2011 (http:// www.english.globalarabnetwork.com/2011103112221/Oman-Politics/sultan-­ qaboos-presides-over-the-opening-of-5th-term-of-the-council-of-oman.html). 48. Ibadhis reject the notion of a caliphate, imamate or a single leader of the umma in favour of the pragmatic principle that Muslim communities should elect leaders on merit, and that the peace and stability of a given Muslim community is more important than pan-Islamic unity. Mohammad al-Awawdah, ‘Ibadis in the Sultanate of Oman: Religious and Sectarian Coexistence’, in Sectarian and Ethnic Diversity in the Gulf, Al-Mesbar Center, 1 September 2014 (online). 49. Upon the Sultan’s accession in 1970, it became one of the last nations on earth to abolish slavery, and discrimination against the descendants of former slaves remains an issue, as does the exploitation of immigrants performing manual labour and domestic tasks. For a recent Omani plea to rectify the latter, see Susan Mubarak’s column ‘Things We Don’t Talk About’, Muscat Daily, 3 January 2012 (online). 50. Marc Valeri, ‘Identity Politics and Nation-Building under Sultan Qaboos’, in Sectarian Politics in the Gulf (Summary Report, Center for International and Regional Studies at Georgetown University in Qatar, 2012), 14. 51. Rania al-Nakib, ‘Education and Democratic Development in Kuwait: Citizens in Waiting’, Chatham House Research Paper, March 2015, 7. 52. The critics who evaluated the 2010 Gulf Youth Theatre Festival productions seemed to think that the message of the play was a significant and moving one; they awarded The Dark Night that year’s prize for Best Script. 53. Transformation Index BTI 2016, ‘Oman’, BertelsmannStiftung, 15 (https://www. bti-project.org/fileadmin/files/BTI/Downloads/Reports/2016/pdf/BTI_2016_ Oman.pdf ).

& Chapter 13

‘Abd al-Rah·īm Kamāl’s Dahsha An Upper Egyptian Lear

Noha Mohamad Mohamad Ibraheem

Illustration 13.1. Yaḥyā al-Fakharānī as Bāsil in the gīla (scorching sand) scene in Dahsha. Notes for this section begin on page 251.

236 Noha Mohamad Mohamad Ibraheem

Is the ground hot beneath my feet, or am I walking in hell? Who says hell is only in the hereafter? Hell is here in this world. Having daughters is hell … O God, have you seen what my daughters did to me? I gave them everything and they treated me cruelly. I raised them up and they drove me out, barefoot, to walk on scorching sand at noon. Yet the fire that burns my heart is fiercer than the one that burns my feet … Make their minds, hearts, and bowels burn, just as my feet are burning!1

Al-Bāsil Ḥamad al-Bāsha is a tycoon who rules like a king over Dahsha, a small fictional village in Upper Egypt. He openly trades in camels while secretly working in gold mining, the true source of his wealth. Father to three daughters, Nawāl, Rābḥa and Niʿma,2 he decides to divide his wealth among his daughters according to their protestations of love for him, with heart-rending and tragic consequences both for him and for his cherished youngest. This is the plot of the 2014 Egyptian television series Dahsha (Perplexity), an adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear in Ṣaʿīdī (Upper Egyptian) dialect, written by ʿAbd al-Raḥīm Kamāl and directed by Shādī al-Fakharānī.3 This article argues that Kamāl’s series performs a subtle intervention in several pivotal cultural and socio-political issues affecting Egyptian society, including widespread and grinding poverty, the marginalization of women, the stigma attached to illegitimate children, and the continuing dependence upon patriarchal leadership. Born in 1971 in Suhāj (Sohag), an Upper Egyptian city, Kamāl specializes in depicting various sides of Upper Egyptian life in his scripts for television.4 His Sufi background lends his writing a unique mystical and mythical essence, which one might assume would attract him to Shakespeare, whose ‘universal’ works are often held to transcend limitations of time and space.5 Yet the impetus for Kamāl’s adaption of Lear in fact stems from a more prosaic source: the urging of renowned Egyptian actor Yaḥyā al-Fakharānī. In 1979, al-Fakharānī played one of three sons in Abnā’ī al-Aʿizāʾ Shukran (Thanks, Dear Children), a TV drama tackling the theme of filial ingratitude. In 2001 and for five consecutive seasons, Fakharānī played Lear in Shakespeare’s play, staged at the National Theatre in classical Arabic using translations by professors Mohamed Enani and Fatma Moussa Mahmoud. Noting how Egyptian audiences empathize with the theme of ingratitude towards parents, al-Fakharānī suggested that Kamāl write a Ṣaʿīdī adaptation for the wider viewership of Egyptian television, suggesting in particular that



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the production be broadcast during Ramadan, when a number of big screen productions mesmerize audiences on free satellite channels not just in Egypt but all over the Arab world. Ṣaʿīdī dramas have proved popular with Egyptian TV viewers,6 and Fakharānī believed such a setting would be particularly appropriate for the plot of Lear: ‘I chose Upper Egypt as a setting for Dahsha since people there are known to hold tight to family bonds, customs, and traditions’.7 Furthermore, Fakharānī and Kamāl had already successfully collaborated on two previous works, Shaykh al-ʿArab Hammām (2010) and al-Khawāja ʿAbd al-Qādir (2012). Kamāl accepted the challenge of devising an innovative way to retell Lear’s story from a Ṣaʿīdī perspective, knowing that, as Imelda Whelehan argues, ‘the process of presenting a literary text on film [or TV] is … where the creative mettle of the adapter is put supremely to the test’.8 He aspired to rewrite Lear to highlight it as ‘a vast poem in the victory of true love’,9 declaring, ‘The main theme I tackle in my writings is love. It is what I care about the most and what I strive to explore from various perspectives’.10 For Kamāl the parent–child relationship between Bāsil and Niʿma drives the story; he felt the love between them merited a more detailed exploration than Shakespeare provided in his presentation of Lear and Cordelia, just as the motives for the extreme ingratitude shown by Nawāl and Rābḥa towards their father deserved closer scrutiny. Moreover, as Julie Sanders puts it, ‘What is often inescapable is the fact that a political or ethical commitment shapes a writer’s, director’s, or performer’s decision to reinterpret a source text’.11 In Dahsha, Kamāl had a specific agenda of cultural, social and political edification, to which rewriting Lear with a Ṣaʿīdī essence served as a gateway.

Dahsha: Characters and Plot Bāsil is a self-made man who suffered as a child when his stepmother and three stepbrothers (ʿAllām, Muhrān and Abū-Ḍīf – whom we will see again later) humiliated him, his mother and his sister Sakan, and denied them his late father’s inheritance. Having decided to pass on his own accumulated wealth before his death, Bāsil listens gratified as Nawāl and Rābḥa express their love for him with grand exaggeration. Niʿma, however, tells the simple truth – and in addition

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chooses to marry without her father’s consent. Bāsil disowns Niʿma and divides his wealth between Nawāl and Rābḥa, who proceed to treat him unfairly and drive him from their houses. Perplexed by his daughters’ cruelty, Bāsil loses his sanity (and gives the series its title12). After reconciling with Niʿma, he decides to give her the golden treasure hidden in his cemetery, and to do so in front of Dahsha’s peasants as a public apology. But the peasants, along with thieves, riot and steal the treasure. Niʿma is killed amidst the chaos, and Bāsil spends the rest of his days mourning beside her grave. The television series also provides a variation on Shakespeare’s Edmund/Edgar subplot. In his youth, Bāsil’s stepbrother ʿAllām squandered his time and money chasing women. A bastard son called Rāḍī, who shows up one night at his door as a young man, is the fruit of one of ʿAllām’s amorous adventures. Determined to legitimize himself, Rāḍī schemes to take everything that belongs to his father and his legitimate half-brother Muntaṣir. He creates a dispute between ʿAllām and Muntaṣir, steals his father’s money and blinds him. He later becomes leader of Dahsha’s thieves, using them to rule over the village. Kamāl makes a number of changes to Shakespeare’s characters and their relationships. Shakespeare’s Lear has lived ‘a long life of absolute power, in which he has been flattered to the top of his bent’;13 he is also eighty years old, impatient and lacking judgement in his old age. Bāsil, however, is ten years younger, a shrewd selfmade man who has suffered poverty and humiliation, succeeded in the dangerous business of gold mining and learned to trust his judgement of character: ‘I have tasted both poverty and wealth, so I know people well’. Kamāl also presents Nawāl and Rābḥa as morally complex fleshand-blood human beings. Unlike Goneril and Regan, they do not hate their younger sister – in fact, after her dispute with Bāsil, they try to convince her to tell her father what he wants to hear, so that she can get her share of his wealth, and they consider attending their sister’s wedding despite Bāsil’s disapproval. Also unlike their Shakespearean counterparts, Nawāl and Rābḥa do not poison one another (they die poisoned by Rābḥa’s vengeful maid, Kawkab). Despite the grudge they feel towards one another by the end of the series, they remain sisters. Furthermore, in Kamāl’s adaptation, the daughters’ husbands dictate, to a large extent, their cruelty to their father. Though cordially



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received at Nawāl’s house, Bāsil humiliates her husband ʿĀmir14 in front of Bāsil’s men and even in front of ʿĀmir’s own son, Muṣṭafa. Nawāl wants to keep her husband and preserve her family, so when forced to choose between her father and her husband, she chooses the latter. ʿĀmir is a greedy, opportunistic bootlicker who shows his true character after Bāsil gives him everything he wants, yet when Nawāl drives Bāsil out of her house, the audience cannot help but feel that Bāsil is paying the price for his arrogance and disrespect, especially towards his son-in-law. Though Rābḥa is stronger and more commanding than her sister, she finds herself pushed into making the same choice when she discovers that her husband, AbūZīd, has secretly married her maid, Kawkab. He agrees to divorce Kawkab on the condition that Rābḥa follows his orders, the first of which is to drive her father away the moment he arrives.

From Shakespearean Page to Egyptian TV Script As Douglas Lanier has observed, ‘Shakespeare’s relationship with specific media or arenas of culture is invested with energy at certain moments and social contexts, and that energy shifts from medium to medium, context to context, over time’.15 Kamāl’s translocation of Lear into the Ṣaʿīdī context after the 25 January 2011 revolution accompanies Lear’s transposition from stage to screen. Television offers different capabilities from the stage, such as a longer timespan: where a staging of King Lear will take at most three hours, Dahsha’s screen time is fifteen hours (thirty episodes, each about half an hour long). More time naturally allows for more details, action and fleshing out of characters, which can amend faults like those A.C. Bradley attributed to Lear: ‘Shakespeare, set upon the dramatic effect of the great scenes … was exceptionally careless of probability, clearness, and consistency in smaller matters’.16 Kamāl’s TV series are known for probing the psyches of their characters, and Dahsha is no exception. In Dahsha, as one reviewer argued, ‘those who know Lear well and have seen various adaptations of it will enjoy watching a new and different vision of it. The portrayal of characters is much deeper, which gives the classical play a whole new dimension’.17 Until the end of Lear, the audience knows little about the nature of the Lear–Cordelia relationship beyond Lear’s declarations at the play’s opening scene: ‘Our joy, / Although our last, not least’18 and ‘I lov’d her most and thought to set my rest / On her kind n ­ ursery’

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(1.1.500). Dahsha, conversely, delves deep into the relationship between Bāsil and Niʿma. Bāsil does not divide his wealth among his daughters until the fourth episode of the series; the first three episodes introduce the audience to Bāsil and Niʿma, showing the details of their relationship. They are like children playing together, with Niʿma often behaving like Bāsil’s mother (for example, comforting him when he wakes up screaming after a nightmare), while Bāsil pampers her and calls her his ‘jewel’ and ‘treasure’. Both are stubborn and proud; Bāsil is accustomed to others’ obedience, and Niʿma always speaks her mind, which prepares the audience for their subsequent dispute. We also see Bāsil treat his sons-in-law disrespectfully, as if they were his servants, setting up their vengeful response after he loses his money and power. The first three episodes also present a more logical warrant – rather than merely ‘shak[ing] all cares and business from [Bāsil’s] age’ (1.1.499) – for Bāsil’s decision to divide his wealth: the death of Bāsil’s friend and business partner Mzīd. Mzīd has a huge store of gold from his years of working in mining with Bāsil, which he gives to Bāsil, having no family of his own. Bāsil then begins to fear that after his death, his stepbrothers will inherit some of his wealth, since according to Islamic doctrine, when a man dies leaving no sons and at least two daughters, the latter inherit only two-thirds of his wealth, the rest going to the deceased’s brothers.19 Bāsil swears defiantly, ‘God has created you as girls and I’ll turn you into boys’, opening the script to the interpretation that Bāsil’s acts incur divine retribution and make his wealth a source of doom to his three daughters. Moreover, before dividing his legacy, Bāsil gathers his stepbrothers to tell them vengefully that they will not get a dime of his money after he dies; he demonstrates his shrewdness and his knowledge of each of his brothers’ intentions and dark secrets, on what he apocalyptically terms his stepbrothers’ ‘day of judgement’. This same gathering brings Niʿma a marriage proposal from her cousin Bilāl, son of Bāsil’s hated stepbrother Muhrān. Bāsil responds sarcastically: What do you think, Niʿma? Your uncle who stole your father’s share in his inheritance, who made your father and your aunt sleep in the barn with cattle, who wishes for everything foul in the world to befall your father … now has the nerve to come and ask for your hand in marriage for his son. O! How life is full of wonders! So what do you think, your father’s daughter?



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Bāsil’s sarcastic tone leaves no room for Niʿma’s opinion, taking her refusal for granted. He is shocked when Niʿma expresses her wish to marry Bilāl: a betrayal by his dearest daughter. He soliloquizes his sadness about Niʿma, addressing Zahzahān the camel: ‘You’re as old as Niʿma. You were both born on the same day, but you’ve never hurt me as she did. You have borne burdens upon your hump and didn’t utter a word, just like me, but she has broken my back, though she’s the only one whom I allowed to climb on my shoulders’. Kamāl even finds an analogue within the Ṣaʿīdī ecosystem for the raging storm on the heath: whereas in Lear, ‘the explosions of Lear’s passion … are … the powers of the tormented soul that we hear and see in the groans of roaring wind and rain’,20 in Dahsha, madness breaks out like fire in Bāsil’s heart and mind, a fire which burns like the gīla (hot sand) upon which he walks at noon, barefoot and broken-hearted, after Rābḥa and Abū-Zīd have driven him out of their house. The adaptation also explores Nawāl and Rābḥa’s feelings towards Niʿma. It turns out they envy her love and closeness to Bāsil. In Kamāl’s sentimental adaptation, they treasure their father’s love more than his money, and Nawāl openly confronts her father to this effect before he leaves her house: Bāsil: Whom do you think yourself dearer than, Nawāl? I abandoned my precious one and clung to you. Nawāl: You clung to us how? By giving us your money? What good is your money when there is no one in your heart but her? ‘Your precious one’, you keep saying – why are we not equally precious to you? You want to give us your money yet treat us like your servants. You disown her yet she remains ‘your precious one’. You are unfair.

Rābḥa also expresses the same feeling to her husband: ‘It’s true that Dad gave us everything he has while he is still alive, but as much as I hoped that we’d become richer and that you’d have your own property and business, I’m still sad. I’m sad that Dad was so angry at Niʿma, as if he had no other daughters but her’. Later she yells at Niʿma: ‘He gave us his money and gave you his heart, and I hate both you and him’. Perhaps finding the story of Goneril and Regan’s rivalry over Edmund unsuitable for the Ṣaʿīdī setting, Kamāl omits it, but he adds a parallel towards the end of the series: Nawāl correctly accuses Rābḥa of envying her for marrying ʿĀmir, whom Rābḥa had wanted for herself. Moreover, while Lear ‘is dramatized primarily from Lear’s point of view, [and] consequently, … the play loses touch with

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Cordelia’s inwardness’,21 the series lets the audience overhear how Niʿma could have replied to the question of Bāsil’s wealth division. In a feverish hallucination, she says: ‘I love you so much, Bāsil, more than all the past and the coming years of my life. I love myself because I’m your daughter. I love you with the kind of love that silences the tongue and makes the heart speak. I love you because I’m part of you and what am I without you, my beloved?’

Contemporary Resonance: Illegitimacy Kamāl’s adaptation raises a number of social issues that resonate in contemporary Egypt, among them the status of illegitimate children. As a bastard in Ṣaʿīdī society, Rāḍī’s status is even worse than that of Shakespeare’s Edmund; while Gloucester brags about his bastard son to Kent, ʿAllām totally refuses to acknowledge his paternity. ʿAllām treats Rāḍī as a blemish on his life: he seeks to hide him, constantly calls him ‘son of devils’, and whips him for stealing his money. As a result of Rāḍī’s perseverance, ʿAllām finally takes him in, but only as his servant – which allows Rāḍī to begin his fight for legitimacy and social acceptance via a ‘ruthless, clever, and ingenious plan’, proving himself a ‘skillful plotter’22 like Edmund. ʿAllām’s relationship with his legitimate son again exaggerates the Gloucester subplot. ʿAllām is an overprotective father whose philandering past makes him worry about Muntaṣir. He locks his son indoors and gives him no chance to go out, and as a result, Muntaṣir remains naïve. He trusts Rāḍī out of ‘credulousness’ and not ‘nobility’,23 and Rāḍī easily tricks him into marrying a prostitute, believing her to be a virtuous virgin. Rāḍī next convinces ʿAllām that Muntaṣir stole his money and warns Muntaṣir that ʿAllām wants him dead. Where Edgar spends his time away from Gloucester disguised as Poor Tom and later helps him when he becomes blind, Muntaṣir seeks refuge at a local pub and becomes an alcoholic. Realizing that ʿAllām will never acknowledge him, Rāḍī decides that if he cannot attain his ‘natural right’, then it is time for him to execute ‘man-made law’.24 First, he commits the horrible crime of burning his father’s eyes with coal, doing it with his own hands (in Lear, though Edmund causes Gloucester’s blinding, he does not commit it himself ). In their last confrontation before Rāḍī commits his crime, Rāḍī asks, ‘Tell me, do your eyes see me as your son or as



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the prostitute’s son?’ ʿAllām responds, ‘I see you as a devil, a son of devils’, to which Rāḍī replies, ‘Good. It’s your luck then that the last thing you’re going to see is Rāḍī’s face. Rāḍī, the prostitute’s son’. Later, recycling an observation of Edgar’s in Lear, ʿAllām’s answer to Muntaṣir’s question about his blindness suggests divine retribution: ‘I enjoyed sinning with my eyesight, so God has deprived me of it’. Rāḍī also forces a marriage between himself and his cousin, AbūḌīf ’s daughter – whom his father had intended for Muntaṣir – in order to assert his claim to his family name and title. Meanwhile, he becomes the head of Dahsha’s thieves. Ironically, they are the only ones who attend his wedding, singing on command: ‘Rāḍī, the son of the esteemed house … who has deep, clean roots’.

Contemporary Relevance: Poverty and Patriarchy Kamāl seeks through Dahsha to shed light on two other current political issues in Egypt: poverty and patriarchy, particularly popular dependence upon patriarchal, ‘strongman’ leadership. Director Shādī al-Fakharānī (Yaḥyā’s son) describes the series’ fictional village thus: ‘Bāsil took this land in the past and increased it, so he is the one who rules it. It is a village that is ruled outside the state’s purview. The state is not present, except through the character of the police officer at the police station’.25 Fuʾād, the young police officer, arrives in Dahsha to find its abandoned police station housing hens; the one anaemic private, Zuʿbur, tells Fuʾād, ‘Dahsha is God’s heaven on Earth. It has neither thieves nor killers’. Attempting to uncover Bāsil’s secrets, Fuʾād breaks into Bāsil’s house while he is at Nawāl’s, but is caught by Bāsil’s men. Bāsil mocks him, ‘Your rank has fooled you and your stupid devil has convinced you to play the macho and break into Bāsil’s house’, but Fuʾād replies, ‘I’m not afraid of you. I represent the law and the state’s power’. To demonstrate who is actually in charge of Dahsha, Bāsil humiliates Fuʾād, stripping him of his arms and uniform and sending him back to the police station. Mocking the state’s power is Bāsil’s way of asserting leadership. Once Bāsil loses his power and mind, however, Dahsha begins to collapse. Both thieves and peasants are sources of danger. As the thieves’ boss, Rāḍī tells his men (again echoing Edmund): ‘The village is now out of control. There is no authority figure but me. … This is bastards’ time. Everything is legitimate for the illegitimate, as

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long as you have my approval’. This shows that ‘underlying the cycle of internecine violence is the principle that whoever bears the title of king exercises the right to govern’.26 The gang even captures Bāsil himself, and its leader Rāḍī now wears Bāsil’s ring, symbolizing his power: ‘This ring is fit for a king and Rāḍī is a king’. Rāḍī also wears a turban, like a crown, while Bāsil is bare-headed. As for the peasants, while in Lear they are only represented through the wretched state of Poor Tom, Dahsha foregrounds them. Their poverty causes greed and leads, eventually, to Dahsha’s destruction. Peasants are constantly seen at the café talking about Bāsil and his money in an exaggerated manner. Jādallah (the analogue to the Earl of Kent), Bāsil’s most loyal man, warns him, ‘I don’t fear demons. I fear people. It’s scary how their hearts change’, and ‘As long as everything is in your hands and people need you, then everything is fine’. Moreover, the peasants themselves know their own nature: ‘This village must be led by a leader, or else we’re going to devour one another and cross all limits’. Sure enough, unrest begins to foment. The peasants openly tell Bāsil, ‘Give us some money. You’ve built mansions and you leave us now to thieves?’ and ‘We’ve always been poor and never complained because we had leaders who protected us. Who can endure poverty and lack of security?’ When Dahsha sinks into chaos and thieves attack people’s homes, terrorizing and stealing from them, finding no mayor and no police to protect them, the peasants have no resort but to cling to mad Bāsil’s image as their patriarchal leader: ‘He’s strong as he always was. His voice is high and his body is full. He will be better than ever’. The desperate need for Bāsil seems an allegory to what some Egyptians felt towards the deposed ex-president, Hosni Mubarak, when chaos spread due to lack of security at the beginning of the 25 January revolution. Dahsha’s peasants know no other leader but Bāsil, just like Egyptians who, after thirty years of his presidency, knew no other leader but Mubarak. The final scene, in which the peasants stampede along with the thieves to get some of Bāsil’s gold, killing one another, also recalls the chaotic aftermath of the 25 January revolution. Such allegory raises the question: ‘Do we still need the patriarchal, tyrannical, and knowledgeable leader who knows how to manage our lives and decide for us in all important matters?’27 When asked frankly whether Bāsil is an allegory for a deposed president of Egypt, Fakharānī claimed the parallels were unintended:



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It is normal for any work of art to be influenced by the reality we are living in. Art takes its ideas from our life. To make matters clear, the character of King Lear in the original play passes through all these phases of change. Thus any resemblance or allegory to a particular ex-president is unintentional. It is merely a coincidence.28

Kamāl, however, seems to leave the answer to his audience.

Contemporary Relevance: Prejudice against Women One characteristic of Ṣaʿīdī society is its preference of boys over girls. A boy carries his father’s name and supports him in his old age, while a girl is a burden on her father’s shoulders that passes to her husband when she gets married. Kamāl highlights this prejudice and its destructive results. For instance, when Bāsil confronts ʿAllām with his knowledge of Rāḍī as the seed of his shameful past, ʿAllām overcomes his initial sense of shock and shame and teases him, saying, ‘Eat your heart out. While you only have daughters, I have two sons; a legitimate and an illegitimate’. Wanting to empower his daughters, Bāsil divides his wealth among them; feeling empowered by his sons, ʿAllām allows Rāḍī into his house. Moreover, though she has two daughters, one of Rābḥa’s greatest wishes is to have a son, and she envies Nawāl hers. Through his ‘clever weaving of stories for each and every character’,29 Kamāl subjects his audience to a myriad of sad stories of Ṣaʿīdī women. Each of Bāsil’s daughters has her own: Nawāl seeks the love of an opportunist who uses her, while Bāsil marries Rābḥa off to a man who hates her, and who secretly marries her maid. Following her heart, Niʿma loses her father, only to endure life with horrid, stingy in-laws and a husband who (unlike the King of France in Lear) does not stand up for her. The stories continue with secondary female characters as well. A thug forcibly marries Bāsil’s sister, Sakan; her husband cuts her lover’s leg, and her lover kills her husband in return, causing her to fear her husband’s ghost. Ghandūra, Abū-Ḍīf’s widow, and her three daughters have no man to protect them, and are thus easy prey for Rāḍī: ‘Since when can the orphan live well? Since when can the widow live well?’ Ghandūra laments. A poor maid like Kawkab, Rābḥa’s maid, seems destined to suffer: once Abū-Zīd abandons her, Kawkab becomes Rābḥa’s toiling slave and Rābḥa, in turn, does her best to make Kawkab abort Abū-Zīd’s baby, brutally telling her

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daughters to kick Kawkab in the belly until she loses the foetus as Rābḥa looks on. ‘Like a ticking bomb, Rābḥa’s reactions are not exaggerated’,30 says actress Ḥanān Mitāwiʿ about the character she plays. And Nuzha, Rāḍī’s mother, is haunted by her past and despised by her own son. In his book The Haunted Stage, Marvin Carlson writes: The retelling of stories already told, the reenactment of events already enacted, the reexperience of emotions already experienced, these are and have always been central concerns of the theatre in all times and places, but closely allied to these concerns are the particular production dynamics of theatre: the stories it chooses to tell, the bodies and other physical materials it utilizes to tell them, and the places in which they are told.31

Kamāl has declared in various interviews, ‘For me, adaptation is a process of deconstruction and reconstruction’32 and ‘Bāsil is Lear and not Lear. He is from him, yet not him’.33 He has thus followed what Charles Marowitz calls ‘the Quantum Leap Approach to Shakespeare’,34 which ‘creates a work of art that intellectually relocates the original play and bears only the faintest resemblance to its pro­ genitor’.35 Although Dahsha follows the same main and subplot of Lear, it does differ from Lear, with the various stories integrated in it by Kamāl. The more Dahsha varies from Lear, the closer it gets to the Egyptian audience, making the series a ‘proximization’ rather than an adaptation.36

Lear: From TV Script to Screen Director Shādī al-Fakharānī cast the series with attention to minute details of character, choosing Yusra al-Lūzī to play Niʿma, for instance, since with her green eyes and light brown hair she resembles Yaḥyā al-Fakharānī in the role of Bāsil. He cast Ḥanān Mitāwiʿ and Samāḥ al-Saʿīd, both actresses with dark eyes and hair, as the other two sisters. And despite being Yaḥyā al-Fakharānī’s son, Shādī protests that his loyalty is to the work above all else, and that on the set, his father is merely one actor among equals. In the long gīla scene, Shādī actually made his father walk barefoot on hot sand.37 In terms of cinematography, the director took advantage of television’s possibilities. The final scene of the massacre, for example, is arguably even sadder than that of Lear trying to awaken the dead



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Illustration 13.2. Apex of tragedy in Dahsha: Bāsil laments over the dead body of his beloved daughter Niʿma, surrounded by the corpses of massacred peasants.

Cordelia, as the camera captures not only Bāsil and Niʿma’s corpse in the foreground, but also peasants’ corpses in the background, exposing Dahsha as the opposite of the ‘heaven’ described by Zuʿbur. Such usage of foreground and background shows how a Shakespearean screen adaptation can take ‘advantage of the possibilities offered by editing and camera effects to present a personal and highly sub­ jective vision of the play’.38 Though no particular time frame is specified, it seems that the series takes place in the 1920s or 1930s. Director of photography Samīr Bahzān discussed the lighting technique of the interior scenes with the director and both agreed it should be dim, adding a sense of historical realism to the series: ‘Back at this time, there was no electricity and houses were lit by small gasoline lamps. Thus it would be illogical for the interior lighting to be as bright as it is in our homes nowadays’.39 Maestro Omar Khayrat, generally known for violins and pianos rather than traditional Ṣaʿīdī instruments in his compositions, wrote the music. Choosing him rather than, for example, Yāsir ʿAbd al-Raḥmān, who is celebrated for composing Ṣaʿīdī series music, meant an unexpected musical score. Khayrat’s introductory music to Dahsha promised its audience a Ṣaʿīdī series different from any they had seen before.

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Critical Reception The result drew enthusiastic praise as well as fierce criticism. To the best of my knowledge, Dahsha is the first Ṣaʿīdī TV series adapted from a Shakespearean play, and Kamāl frankly admitted that ‘translocating a classical work of art into an Egyptian context was not as easy a task as some might imagine’.40 Critics acknowledged Kamāl’s success in ‘finding the convincing and appealing Egyptian objective correlative for Lear, to make it simple enough for all its audience to grasp’.41 Writer and critic Ḍuḥā al-Mul noted, ‘What increases the value of Dahsha is Kamāl’s ability to create a dramatic equation which is parallel to Lear’s royalty, yet within an Arab setting. … It is as if the script is totally original and not adapted from a Shakespearean play’.42 Yet at least some viewers, accustomed to Muḥammad Ṣafāʾ ʿĀmir’s ‘divine retribution endings’ (rewarding the good characters and punishing the evil), were themselves ‘perplexed’ by Kamāl’s complex characters, gloomy atmosphere and tragic ending. Renowned scriptwriter and critic Musṭafa Muḥarram railed in a lengthy critique: The makers of Dahsha must bear in mind that Tragedy and Melodrama differ from one another … Many of those who watched the series have complained to me that they felt gloomy watching it, burdened with cares, and hating life itself, and so did not watch it till the end.43

Muḥarram also took issue with Nawāl and Rābḥa’s (and their husbands’) ingratitude to Bāsil, finding it unrealistic: In Upper Egypt, after the daughter marries, she remains totally obedient, loving and grateful towards her father. Her husband cannot force her to do the opposite. In fact, he respects her for respecting her father. This is what is lacking in the series. If the characters had been present in a context with more flexible customs and traditions, I believe, events would have been more plausible, or else the writer could have replaced the three daughters with three sons.44

In a Ṣaʿīdī context, Nawāl and Rābḥa’s ingratitude to Bāsil is unacceptable. Yet this is precisely what Kamāl relies on, asserting: As for the daughters’ ingratitude to their father and how it is tackled in the series, it is intentional, as it is highly unexpected. For daughters, especially, to be ungrateful means utmost cruelty … Ingratitude … is a human doing which is bound to neither particular time nor context.45



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Such ingratitude has religious as well as social implications. As witnesses to Basil’s crying in the scorching sand scene – “I am a father and a father is like a god and you are above us all, God”– and to his curses upon his daughters, audiences may expect divine retribution as a dramatic imperative.46 Bahzān’s lighting design received mixed reviews; Muḥarram lamented that ‘Bahzān did not pay attention to the fact that the series will be aired on TV and the TV screen, being smaller than that of the cinema, condenses darkness. … Dimness is generally not preferred on TV, especially when it has no dramatic significance’.47 But critics almost uniformly praised the director and the entire cast of Dahsha, especially (and predictably) Fakharānī ‘the acting icon, [who] acted admirably in various dramatic scenes’.48 Hanāʾ al-ʿUmair enthused that Fakharānī’s ‘spontaneity and professionalism make him an exceptional case in which the actor and the character become one’.49 Even the difficult-to-please Muḥarram singled out Shādī al-Fakharānī for compliments: ‘… I admire Shādī’s technique, that is, his choice of shots which suit the TV screen and his avoidance of bird-eye shots, which cause alienation and visual mysteriousness. The movement of the camera in his shots is purposeful and rhythmic, and he directs the actor in the shot very well’.50 ʿUmair wrote that Shādī’s ‘choice of the desert as an exterior setting adds aesthetic sense to the series’.51 Critics also debated the merits of Dahsha’s decor, since the only house on the set that reflected wealth and grandeur was Bāsil’s, while his daughters’ houses look like peasants’ houses, only bigger. Sakan’s house appears somewhat grand, yet the dim light meant the audience saw little of it. Since the well-furnished houses of the rich were part of the spectacle of all previous Ṣaʿīdī series, viewers found this inexplicable. Muḥarram again: ‘Decor in Dahsha is not up to the grandeur of the characters. In fact, the decoration of the houses of Basil’s family does not show their high financial status’.52 Conversely, Ḍuḥā al-Mul felt that ‘the decor is in harmony with place and time. … It also asserts Bāsil’s domination’,53 and she praised Khayrat’s music as ‘capable of reflecting the content of the series and adding various sensations of sadness, happiness, fury, and satisfaction to its scenes’.54

250 Noha Mohamad Mohamad Ibraheem

Conclusion Whenever a new screen adaptation of the Bard’s works comes out, it stirs a debate about televising Shakespeare, with some claiming ‘it will be necessary for television to grow up to Shakespeare – his stature is too great to be reduced to it’,55 and others that ‘when his plays are made into movies [or a TV series], Shakespeare adapts to the authority of [TV] more than [TV] adapts to the authority of Shakespeare’.56 Such shifts in genre create ‘outerspeares … where ­Shakespeare becomes a radically different entity and an emblem of how intermedial adaptation produces … innovative forms of narrative’.57 In Dahsha, Kamāl creates an ‘outerspeare’ in which he presents Lear on TV through a Ṣaʿīdī lens to shed light on significant issues. Although Kamāl knows that ‘television is a key institution for the production of national culture in Egypt’,58 he does not follow the didactic model of director Muḥammad Fāḍil in exploiting drama ‘to teach people without them sensing it’.59 He cares most about presenting his themes and ideas, most importantly the theme of love, which is at the core of his artistic project as a scriptwriter. Thus, in Dahsha, he does not seek to lecture the audience about Shakespeare, but rather aims their attention at the theme of love and its nemesis, hatred. Integrating the Bard’s works in the local modern media of v­ arious cultures does not demean Shakespeare’s status. In fact, ‘the association with mass culture lends Shakespeare street credibility, broad intelligibility, and celebrity’.60 Lila Abu-Lughod argues that ‘the best television serials are gripping spectacles with moral truths that move their audience to tears, tensions and plots that keep them interested, loveable characters who make them laugh, brilliant lines that are worth repeating, music that embeds the shows in the memory, and characters who forge with viewers long-lasting attachments’.61 Despite receiving certain negative critiques, I believe that Dahsha is one of those ‘best television serials’. Not only does it possess all the elements Abu-Lughod describes, it also offers a set of socio-­political issues for audiences to debate, and concludes with an uplifting ­message. In the wake of the chaos and the violence, sitting by ­Niʿma’s grave, Kamāl’s Bāsil sums up the essence of love: ‘The treasure in this world is for the lover to be with his beloved … Everything decreases when one takes from it, except for love. The more you take from it, the more it increases’.



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Noha Mohamad Mohamad Ibraheem is Assistant Lecturer in the English Department, Faculty of Arts, Cairo University, Egypt. She is the author of ‘Belated’ Shakespearean Mosaics: ‘Shakespeare Malikan’, ‘Mutabilitie’, and ‘Shakespeare in Love’ (Lambert, 2014) and a contributor to The Cambridge World Encyclopaedia of Stage Actors and Actresses (Cambridge, 2015). She holds an MA in drama and comparative literature from Cairo University and is currently a doctoral student at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany.

Notes 1. Spoken by al-Bāsil in Dahsha, directed by Shādī al-Fakharānī. All translations from Arabic are mine unless otherwise indicated. 2. A note on names: al-Bāsil (the brave one) alludes to the protagonist’s lifelong struggles, and suggests that he will need courage to face the upcoming blows in his life. Nawāl is derived from the Arabic verb yanāl (to attain); Nawāl is the possessive type, and she seeks to attain affection at any cost. Rābḥa (woman who profits) reflects the nature of Rābḥa’s character, for she is extremely pragmatic and calculating. Niʿma (bliss) implies the youngest daughter’s love and devotion to her father in his old age. 3. Produced by Associates for Media Productions, and starring Yaḥyā al-Fakharānī, Fatḥī ʿAbd al-Wahhāb, Nabīl al-Ḥalfāwī, Yusra al-Lūzī, Ḥanān Mitāwiʿ, ʿAmr ʿAābid, Samāḥ al-Saʿīd, and others. 4. Upper Egypt is the southern part of the country, called ‘upper’ because the Nile flows from south to north. To date Kamāl has written six TV series, five of which are set there: al-Raḥāya: Ḥajar al-Qulūb (The Grinding Stone: Stone Hearts, 2009), Shaykh al-ʿArab Hammām: Ākhir Mulūk al-Ṣaʿīd (Hammām, Sheikh of the Arabs: The Last King of Upper Egypt, 2010), al-Khawāja ʿAbd al-Qādir (ʿAbd al-Qādir the Foreigner, 2012), Dahsha (Perplexity, 2014), Wannūs (2016) and Yūnis Wald Faḍḍa (Yūnis, Faḍḍa’s Son, 2016). He has also written a film script, novels and short stories. 5. As H.R. Coursen argues in Watching Shakespeare on Television (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses Inc., 1993), 16, ‘One factor in Shakespeare’s apparently infinite capacity for being reshaped and reexperienced in different times and new media is his escape from the defining structure of the stage within which his plays occur’. 6. Previous highly successful Ṣaʿīdī series include Muḥammad Ṣafāʾ ʿĀmir’s Dhiʾāb al-Jabal (Outcasts, 1992), al-Dūʾ al-Shārid (The Straying Light, 1998) and Ḥadāʾq al-Shaytān (Devil’s Gardens, 2006) in addition to Kamāl’s own al-Raḥāya (2009) and Shaykh al-ʿArab Hammām (2010). 7. Yaḥyā al-Fakharānī, interview by Ṭāriq Shiḥāta, ‘Shakespeare Inspired Me with the Idea for Dahsha’, el-balad.com, 8 July, 2014, http://www.el-balad. com/1036786.

252 Noha Mohamad Mohamad Ibraheem 8. Imelda Whelehan, ‘Adaptations: The Contemporary Dilemmas’, in Adaptations: From Text to Screen, Screen to Text, ed. Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 16. 9. R.W. Chambers, King Lear (Glasgow: Jackson, Son, and Company, 1940), 48. 10. ʿAbd al-Raḥīm Kamāl, interview by Muḥammad Mustafa Ḥasan, ‘Al-Fakharānī and His Comrades Are Still Able to Dramatically Perplex Us’, Al-ahram.org, 23 August 2014, http://www.ahram.org.eg/NewsQ/317981.aspx. 11. Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), 3. 12. According to Muʿjam al-Maʿānī al-Jāmʿi [The Comprehensive Arabic Dictionary], dahsha means ‘confusion, amazement, perplexity, mesmerism, what one feels when experiencing an unexpected and surprising matter’. ‘Dahsha’ http://www. almaany.com/ar/dict/ar-ar/%D8%AF%D9%87%D8%B4%D8%A9. 13. A.C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth (London: Macmillan, 1905), 282. 14. ʿĀmir is the son of a deceased servant of Bāsil who raised him after his father died. 15. Douglas Lanier, ‘Recent Shakespeare Adaptation and the Mutations of Cultural Capital’, The Free Library, http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Recent Shakespeare adaptation and the mutations of cultural capital.-a0238749502. 16. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, 258. 17. Hanāʾ al-ʿUmair, ‘Dahsha: An Amazing Adaptation of Shakespeare’s Great ­Tragedy’, al-Riyadh, http://www.alriyadh.com/951299. 18. William Shakespeare, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (New Lanark: Geddes and Grosset, 2001), King Lear 1.1.499. 19. The doctrine’s goal is for males to protect females’ money. 20. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, 270. 21. Peter Erickson, ‘Adrienne Rich’s Re-Vision of Shakespeare’, in Women’s Re-Visions of Shakespeare: On the Responses of Dickenson, Woolf, Rich, H.D. George Eliot, and Others, ed. Marianne Novy (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 192. 22. Maurice Charney, Shakespeare’s Villains (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2012), 90. 23. A distinction drawn by William R. Elton in his analysis of Edgar. See Elton, ‘King Lear’ and the Gods (San Marino, CA: The Huntington Library, 1966), 84. 24. Elton, ‘King Lear’ and the Gods, 126. 25. Shādī al-Fakharānī, interview by Muḥsin Maḥmūd, ‘I Followed My Feeling While Choosing Dahsha’s Cast’, Almasryalyoum.com, 9 August 2014, http://www. almasryalyoum.com/news/details/498001. 26. Emily Sun, Succeeding King Lear: Literature, Exposure, and the Possibility of Politics (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 13. 27. Maḥmūd Fikrī, ‘Lear’s Perplexity and Our Bitter Reality’, My Egypt, 7 July 2014, http://www.myegyptmag.com/index.php/%D8%A7%D9%84%D8 %A3%D9%82%D8%B3%D8%A7%D9%85/%D9%81%D9%86%D9%8 8%D9%86/5358-art-07-07-2014. 28. Yaḥyā al-Fakharānī, interview by ‘Amr Ṣaḥṣāḥ, ‘My Character in Dahsha is by Coincidence Allegorical to Arab Rulers’, Youm7.com, 8 August 2014, http://www. youm7.com/story/2014/8/8/%d9%8a%d8%ad%d9%8a%d9%89_%d8%a7%d9



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%84%d9%81%d8%ae%d8%b1%d8%a7%d9%86%d9%89__%d8%b4%d8%ae %d8%b5%d9%8a%d8%aa%d9%89_%d9%81%d9%89_%d8%af%d9%87%d8% b4%d8%a9_%d8%aa%d8%ad%d9%85%d9%84_%d8%a5%d8%b3%d9%82%d 8%a7%d8%b7%d8%a7_%d8%b9%d9%84%d9%89_%d8%a7%d9%84%d8%a d%d9%83%d8%a7%d9%85_%d8%a7%d9%84%d8%b9%d8%b1%d8%a8_%d 8%a8/1809793#.VuIEAJb2bIV. 29. Aḥmad Majdī Hammām, ‘Yaḥyā al-Fakharānī Resurrects Lear in Dahsha’, al-Hayat, 8 August 2014, http://www.alhayat.com/Articles/3901190/ ‫ىيحي‬-‫ينارخفلا‬-‫ديعتسي‬--‫ريل‬--‫ريبسكش‬-‫يف‬--‫ةشهد‬ 30. Ḥanān Mitāwiʿ, interview by Muḥammad Muṣṭafa Ḥasan, ‘Al-Fakharānī and His Comrades Are Still Able to Dramatically Perplex Us’, Al-ahram.org, 23 August 2014, http://www.ahram.org.eg/NewsQ/317981.aspx. 31. Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 3. 32. ʿAbd al-Raḥīm Kamāl, interview by Maḥmūd Saʿd, Ākhir Al-Nahār, Al-Nahar TV, 5 September 2014. 33. ʿAbd al-Raḥīm Kamāl, interview by Pasant Ḥasan, Studio al-Thaqāfa, Al-Masreya TV, 8 March 2016. 34. Charles Marowitz, Recycling Shakespeare (Milwaukee, WI: Applause Theatre Book Publishers, 1991), 9. 35. Gérard Genette, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, trans. Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 304. 36. As H.R. Coursen argues, ‘the hypertext transposes the diegesis of its hypotext to bring it up to date and closer to its own audience (in temporal, geographic, or social terms)’. Coursen, Shakespeare Translated: Derivatives on Film and TV (New York: Peter Lang Publishing Inc., 2005), 2. 37. Yaḥyā Al-Fakharānī, interview by Muḥsin Maḥmūd, ‘Dahsha Is a Different Kind of Drama’, Almasryalyoum.com, 9 August 2014, http://www.almasryalyoum. com/news/details/498001. 38. Sarah Hatchuel, Shakespeare, from Stage to Screen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 15. 39. Shādī al-Fakharānī, interview by Muḥsin Maḥmūd. 40. ʿAbd al-Raḥīm Kamāl, interview by Muḥammad Mustafa Ḥasan. 41. Aḥmad Majdī Hammām, ‘Yaḥyā al-Fakharānī Resurrects Lear in Dahsha’. 42. Ḍuḥā ʿAbd al-Raʾūf al-Mul, ‘King Lear in the Egyptian Series Dahsha’, Diwan al-Arab, http://www.diwanalarab.com/spip.php?page=article&id_article=39979. 43. Musṭafa Muḥarram, ‘Dahsha Judged by Shakespeare’, Al-Ahram, last modified 1 August 2014, http://www.ahram.org.eg/NewsQ/309501.aspx. 44. Musṭafa Muḥarram, ‘Dahsha Judged by Shakespeare’. 45. ʿAbd al-Raḥīm Kamāl, interview by Muḥammad Mustafa Ḥasan. 46. In The Holy Quran, God decrees kindness to one’s parents right after he decrees worshiping Him. In Surah Al-Isra’ (The Night Journey), verse number twenty three, God says: (In the Name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful) “Thy Lord hath decreed that ye worship none but Him, and that ye be kind to parents. Whether one or both of them attain old age in thy life, say not to them a word of contempt, nor repel them, but address them in terms of honour” (God Almighty has spoken the truth).

254 Noha Mohamad Mohamad Ibraheem 47. Musṭafa Muḥarram, ‘Dahsha Judged by Shakespeare’. 48. Musṭafa Muḥarram, ‘Dahsha Judged by Shakespeare’. 49. Hanāʾ al-ʿUmair, ‘Dahsha: An Amazing Adaptation of Shakespeare’s Great Tragedy’. 50. Musṭafa Muḥarram, ‘Dahsha Judged by Shakespeare’. 51. Hanāʾ al-ʿUmair, ‘Dahsha: An Amazing Adaptation of Shakespeare’s Great Tragedy’. 52. Musṭafa Muḥarram, ‘Dahsha Judged by Shakespeare’. 53. Ḍuḥā ʿAbd al-Raʾūf al-Mul, ‘King Lear in the Egyptian Series Dahsha’. 54. Ḍuḥā ʿAbd al-Raʾūf al-Mul, ‘King Lear in the Egyptian Series Dahsha’. 55. Frank W. Wadsworth, ‘“Sound and Fury”: King Lear on Television’, The Quarterly of Film, Radio, and Television 8, no. 3 (1954): 268, http://www.jstor.org/ stable/1209734. 56. Harry Keyishian, ‘Shakespeare and the Genre Movie: The Case of Hamlet’, in The Cambridge Guide to Shakespeare on Film, ed. Russell Jackson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 74. 57. Daniel Fischlin, introduction to Fischlin, ed., OuterSpeares: Shakespeare, Intermedia, and the Limits of Adaptation (Toronto, Buffalo and London: University of Toronto Press, 2014), 4. 58. Lila Abu-Lughod, Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt (­Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 7. 59. Lila Abu-Lughod, ‘The Objects of Soap Opera: Egyptian Television and the Cultural Politics of Modernity’, in Worlds Apart: Modernity through the Prism of the Local, ed. Daniel Miller (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 192. 60. Lanier, ‘Recent Shakespeare Adaptation’. 61. Abu-Lughod, Dramas of Nationhood, 7.

& Chapter 14

Ophelia Is Not Dead at 50 An Interview with Nabyl Lahlou Khalid Amine Translated by Katherine Hennessey

On Arab stages, Shakespeare’s tragedies have a particular and exciting history, the roots of which go back to the nineteenth century. The various manifestations of Shakespeare in Arabic have oscillated between reproducing his work in the early translations of the late nineteenth century on the one hand and, on the other, adapting and rewriting the texts in order to set them in Arabic contexts. Distinguished Moroccan playwright and director Nabyl Lahlou has opted for the latter approach. In 1969 he composed the play Ophelia Is Not Dead, whose two protagonists are called Hamlet and Macbeth. The play was originally written in French; forty years later, Lahlou translated his play into Arabic. In 2016, Ophelia Is Not Dead appeared in an English translation by Khalid Amine in the anthology Four Arab Hamlet Plays.1

Notes for this section begin on page 263.

256 Khalid Amine

My conversation with Lahlou took pace on the unique occasion of 2016, 400 years after Shakespeare’s death. It re-examines the differing relationships between Shakespeare and ‘Us’. It also seeks to tease out some of the complexities of how Arab theatre-makers have translated, adapted and transplanted Shakespeare. —Khalid Amine Amine: Your Hamlet in Ophelia Is Not Dead is an example of the ‘post-romantic Arab Hamlet’, incapable of correcting the ‘out-of-joint’ world that surrounds him. He aspires to be a Che Guevara, relentlessly pursuing justice, but is paralysed by guilt and sadness. Thus the subtext refers to political structures within the Arab world. In your text, Hamlet and Macbeth become figures emblematic of those Moroccan artists who dedicate their lives to the theatre but reap only repression or frustration, torture or prison. ‘Every militant actor had his own cell’, says your Hamlet, commenting on his own incarceration after ten years of impasse. Yet these two characters go on with their theatrical exercises, despite their paralysis, even if they are no longer able to act on the stage generating new roles and new plays. They are frustrated artists, reduced to silence. Why this choice? Lahlou: Right from the beginning of the play, Hamlet clearly demonstrates that he does not believe in the Revolution, nor in revolutions, while Macbeth displays a revolutionary side, motivated by disgust for the socio-political situation in which he vegetates. The two characters realize that they have voluntarily imprisoned themselves inside their own heads, their own dreams, and they are unable to escape, except through acting – which they do compulsively, to combat their obsession with the fact that they are unable to play the roles they’d always wanted. I remember writing Ophelia Is Not Dead in the wake of a car acci­ dent that could have cost me my life. And since the moment that I came out alive from the wreckage, I’ve opted to believe, philosophically, that the destiny of every human being is fated from birth, from the moment he or she comes into the world. So many men and women at the wheel of their car have died on that three-lane road between Rabat and Kenitra, where American military instructors live and work on the Kenitra military base. And the spark for com­posing Ophelia Is Not Dead came, quite simply, out of the four months that I was recovering, my entire left leg fractured and ­plastered.



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I would endlessly ask myself, every time I stood up with the aid of my crutches: ‘Will I be able to continue with theatre, or will I be crippled for the rest of my days?’ That’s the sort of thing Macbeth and Hamlet constantly do in Ophelia. Once during my second month of convalescence, which was July 1969, I decided to go to the Turkish bath. I took my son with me; he was fourteen months old. The taxi driver who took us there absolutely refused to believe the news coming through an aging radio lodged in the decrepit dashboard of his beaten-up taxi. The radio was announcing that American astronauts had landed on the moon, which provoked the driver into such a fury that he cried ‘Lies! Lies! It’s impossible that they’ve gone to the moon. The Qur’an doesn’t mention it’. That’s why my Macbeth says ‘We need to de-Qur’anize, to better re-Qur’anize’. Amine: Ophelia Is Not Dead sparkles with artistic wordplay; you investigate the sound and the sense of words, looking for humour and intellectual reflection. Your dialogue contains multiple rhyme schemes. How do you translate these from French into classical Arabic? And how do you preserve the subtexts? Lahlou: I conceived Ophelia Is Not Dead in French. But in my own French – not the French of Descartes or Balzac, still less the French of Sartre or Camus, but a French that my teachers at the Lycée Moulay Idriss in Fez had helped me discover and come to love. Meanwhile my teachers of Arabic didn’t care how we felt about that language – I only came to love it after reading an Arabic-language translation of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Arabic, no matter however beautiful and rich it is, doesn’t lend itself to wordplay, puns, sarcasm or even much humour. So, as translator of my own play, I had to find the sense and the idea that cor­responded to every line where there was a play on words. For example, Macbeth says, ‘I want to revolutionize language on my own terms – I want to write façon with a double S!’2 You can’t just translate that line into Arabic as is. And for numerous such lines, I had to find Arabic equivalents. I think I succeeded. Amine: You use words that many might describe as obscene, vulgar or politically incorrect – but to great dramatic effect. You put offensive language in the mouths of Hamlet and Macbeth, sometimes erotically,

258 Khalid Amine

sometimes with well-calculated excess, and always with the intention of making the audience uneasy. Is this your way of expressing disaster, sickness, the polar opposite of the indifference of an audience that’s just out to have fun? Or do you have a different aim? Lahlou: The need to feel free, liberated from all constraints – whatever they may be, whether born of calculation or compromise or selling out – creates theatre texts that are strong, smart and meaningful, born as a protest against self-censorship and against the fear of censorship. I wrote Ophelia Is Not Dead in a spirit of and a desire for total freedom, a universal vision of serving humankind. And once it was completely finished, I had the irresistible urge to stage it. From its first performance in May 1970, where I played Macbeth to Ms Josiane Ben Haim’s Hamlet, Ophelia Is Not Dead aroused curiosity, questions and good reviews, all very encouraging for me as a twenty-five-year-old author and director. Two years before I wrote Ophelia, the kidnapping and assassination of the great Moroccan political leader Mehdi Ben Barka, on the 29th of October 1965,3 had inspired me to write a play entitled The Billionaires, a satiric comedy which showed thugs loafing in armchairs in a cosy lounge, chatting and drinking and waiting for the general, the one who had ordered the kidnapping and assassination, to wake up and pay them. You can imagine the kinds of lines these thugs exchange as they wait for the general to arrive. They can only converse in their language, which they delight in saturating with vulgarity and uncouth words, as you see in gangster films. In my play The Turtles, I showed an actress who entered wearing an inflatable penis, saying, ‘I’ve become a man, so now I have the right to enter Paradise’. The Turtles was only performed once, in February 1971, six months before the first attempt at a military coup d’état.4 Fortunately, the coup failed; if it had succeeded, its leaders would surely have established a dictatorship and I wouldn’t be here to respond to your very interesting questions. I think that just as ordinary or poetic words have their place on the stage, so should nasty, obscene, vulgar and provocative ones. Since I was very young I’ve always enjoyed laughing at people who are really straitlaced, pulling their legs. I remember an evening during Ramadan, at a youth centre, I was acting the role of a little old man, pious and moralizing, with a beard drawn on my face with the soot of a scorched cork, and I decided to try to provoke the audience



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by using the word zob,5 which wasn’t in the script. As soon as I said it, the audience launched a hailstorm of shoes and slippers at me. I had to race off the platform that I was playing on, good amateur actor that I was, to escape a thrashing. When I think that George Bush only had a single pair thrown at him, after he assaulted and violated an entire country and its people… Amine: With actresses Sophia Hadi and Nadia Niazi on stage, as in your 2016 Tangier production, the play becomes a sharp critique of deeply rooted patriarchal power structures. Their performance revealed how the theatre can serve as a means for the marginalized and subaltern to participate in political life as well as in the prevailing systems of dramatic representation. The production history of the piece indicates that it has continued to speak to diverse Moroccan audiences over the course of four decades, yet it incessantly calls into question comfortable Moroccan definitions of what constitutes acceptable theatre. Why did you return once again to Ophelia Is Not Dead in 2015–16? Lahlou: Ophelia Is Not Dead was written in French in 1969 and was performed in that language, for the first time, in May 1970.6 It wasn’t until 2015 that I decided to translate it into literary Arabic. Translating it into the beautiful, rich language of classical Arabic gave it an extraordinary impact and vision, both human and political. It went beyond what spectators had seen in the five French-language performances, despite those productions’ wide variety in casting and mise-en-scène. I’ve directed Ophelia Is Not Dead with two actors as Macbeth and Hamlet, and with two actresses. This time, for the classical Arabic version, I wanted to cast Sophia Hadi and Nadia Niazi. Certain lines, replete with scatological words and phrases that would be provocative in an Arab Muslim society swaddled from its birth in rigid religiosity and stupid interdictions – those lines were smooth as silk thanks to the graceful performance of the two actresses. And the theatrical realism had its own grace as well; there was no Brechtian alienation. The idea of performance is the jumping-­off point from which I wrote Ophelia Is Not Dead: the fear of no longer being able to take to the stage and act, under repressive, dictatorial regimes. When I produced Ophelia again in 2015–16, I had three compelling goals: first, to see the sublime actress Sophia Hadi play Macbeth in classical Arabic, though she had been educated entirely in French;

260 Khalid Amine

Illustration 14.1. Ophelia Is Not Dead, Tangier, 14 April 2016.

second, to show that Nadia Niazi, who had worked in banal roles in film and television, was capable of excellent stage acting, despite never having trained for the theatre; third, to prove that admirable, transcendent theatre can be made in classical Arabic. Ophelia Is Not Dead conveyed both wit and pleasure to its audiences, while making them laugh, reflect, and love theatre in classical Arabic – an Arabic totally and definitively liberated from its taboos, its fatwas and the other red lines linked to Islam and the ‘holiness’ of its Arab-Muslim leaders. Two of my plays, The Turtles and The Grand Carnival, were banned in 1971 and 1972 respectively, because their content was judged disrespectful to the guardians of the re-­established order. I say re-established, because ‘order’ in non-­ democratic countries is never stable. Amine: And what impact has Ophelia Is Not Dead had on the Moroccan public, as they continue to feel the effects of the Arab Spring? Lahlou: Making theatre in the Arab-Muslim world requires the creative intelligence, imagination and audacity to be liberated from state and religious control. The impact that the first Arabic-language performance of Ophelia had on the Moroccan public was remarkable, even if the Moroccan elite – progressive, cultivated, intellectualized,



Ophelia Is Not Dead at 50: An Interview with Nabyl Lahlou

Illustration 14.2. Ophelia Is Not Dead, 2016. Set design.

Illustration 14.3. Nadia Niazi in Ophelia Is Not Dead, 2016.

261

262 Khalid Amine

politicized – chose to be notably absent. ‘I neutralize my intelligence and moderate myself’, as Hamlet says to Macbeth. When Ophelia was performed in Paris in 1972, it prompted dozens of articles and reviews, all positive and laudatory. But for this first production of Ophelia in Arabic, more than forty years after the first production in French, the response was sour: the public preferred to park itself in front of a television screen to watch a football match. ‘We need to de-footballize and de-televise this race and give it back its taste for life’, says Macbeth. There was no response in print, and disconcerting silence from the critics, who opted to remain cosy in their sarcophagi. Abandonment by the media. Today, in the digital age, with all our new means of communication and advertising, thought struggles for its very existence against devouring, insatiable hungers. As for the ‘Arab Spring’, I think it’s a scam, one that continues to target the poor peoples and tribes of the Arab world. Arab theatre-makers should tackle the task of dramatizing this hoax, this ruse, this fraud. Nabyl Lahlou (b. 1945) was born in Fes, Morocco. He has been ­heralded as a revolutionary of Moroccan theatre since the premiere of his play Ophélie n’est pas morte (Ophelia Is Not Dead) in 1970. Lahlou has written and directed more than fifteen plays and has written, directed, produced or starred in nine films. Khalid Amine is Professor of Performance Studies at Abdelmalek Essaadi University, Tetouan, Morocco, and founding president (since 2006) of the International Centre for Performance Studies (ICPS) in Tangier. In 2007 he won the International Federation for Theatre Research’s Helsinki Prize. Author of four books and numerous articles, he co-wrote (with Marvin Carlson) The Theatres of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia: Performance Traditions of the M ­ aghreb (Palgrave, 2012). His translation of Lahlou’s Ophelia Is Not Dead appears in Four Arab Hamlet Plays (New York: Martin Segal Theatre Center, 2015).



Ophelia Is Not Dead at 50: An Interview with Nabyl Lahlou

263

Notes 1. Four Arab Hamlet Plays, edited by Marvin Carlson and Margaret Litvin with Joy Arab (New York: Martin E. Segal Theatre Centre, 2016). 2. In Amine’s English translation for Four Arab Hamlet Plays, this line reads: ‘I want to revolutionize the language and to write it in my way and in my own way I write aspect with two s’s’ (45). 3. Prominent Moroccan politician Mehdi Ben Barka, founder of the leftist party called the National Union of Popular Forces, was accused in 1962 of plotting against King Hassan II. Exiled, he continued to call for radical political change, supporting socialist and national liberation movements throughout Africa, Asia and Latin America; his supporters hailed him as a Moroccan Che Guevara. In 1965 he was abducted in France, never to be seen again. Two French policemen received prison sentences for taking part in the abduction; Hassan II’s Minister of Interior, General Mohamed Oufkir, is strongly suspected of masterminding Ben Barka’s death. 4. Lahlou is referring to the ‘Skhīrāt coup d’état’, an unsuccessful attempt to assassi­ nate King Hassan II on 10 July 1971, led by rebel Moroccan military officers Lieutenant-Colonel M’hamed Ababou and General Mohamed Medbouh. 5. Moroccan slang for ‘penis’. 6. The play was also staged once, in October 1974, in a darija (Moroccan Arabic) translation, at the Mohammed V theatre.

& Index NOTE: Page references with an f are figures. Abaza, Rushdy, 114f Abdelaziz, Lubna, 114f Abdel-Wahab, Fatin, 112 ‘Abdu, Tanyus, 40, 47 Abdullah, Umm, 197 Abnā’ī al-Aʿizāʾ Shukran (Thanks, Dear Children), 236 Aboudoma, Mahmoud, 13, 14, 15, 17, 25, 28; Dance of the Scorpions, 25, 26; encounters with Hamlet, 17 al-‘Absī, ‘Antara ibn Shaddād, 219 Abu-Deeb, Kamal, 5, 64 Abyad, Jurj, 42–44 Adams, Jonathon, 201, 211 African Muslims, 227 Ah Min Ḥawa’ (Beware of Eve!), 112, 114f Aichou Shakespeare, 148, 149 Ain Shams University, 110 Akbar, Jawad, 205 al-Akhbar newspaper, 43 Alameddine, Rabih, 172–86; An Unnecessary Woman and Macbeth, 173, 174, 175–79, 183, 185; I, The Divine and King Lear, 179–82 Aleppo, Syria, 53 Alexandria, Egypt, 3, 190, 192 Algeria, 3

Ali, Omar Ahmed Abdullah, 197, 199, 200 A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Enani) translation, 103 A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Shakespeare), 152–68, 157f, 162f; Ashtar for Theatre Productions and Training, 155–60; in Egypt and Sweden, 188–90; Al-Kasaba Theatre Academy, 160–67 Amin, Muhammad ‘Abd al-‘Aziz, 39 Amīn ‘Aṭā Allāh Theatre, 124 Amine, Khalid, 8, 255 al-Amīra al-Iskandarāniyya (The Alexandrian Princess [Ṣannū‘]), 123 Amman International Theatre Festival (1998), 191 ‘āmmiyya (colloquial Arabic), 122, 123, 125, 129, 130, 132, 145 Ana Horra (I Am Free!), 112 Andrieaux, Phillip, 160 Antar, 219f, 223, 226, 227, 229. See also The Dark Night (al-Layla al-Ḥālika [al-Izkī]) Antun, Farah, 36, 48 An Unnecessary Woman (Alameddine), 173, 174, 175–79, 183, 185

266 Index

Al-Aoofi, Saleh Mohammed, 202 Aoun, Iman, 155, 156, 157, 159 Apollo School, 63 appropriation: Arab Hamlet, 21–23; global exchange of, 17–20; postcolonial, 20 Aqaba workshop, 191 Arab/Gulf politics, 225 Arab Hamlet appropriation, 21–23 Arabian Peninsula, 228 Arabic poetry: sonnets in, 77–100; in Spain, 79 Arab Spring, 2 Arab theatrical conventions, 14 Arab traditions, Hamlet (Shakespeare), 13–29 army volunteers (women), 113f al-‘Arūsa (The Bride), 128 Ashour, Nu‘man, 103 Ashtar for Theatre Productions and Training, 155–60 ‘Atiyyah, Na‘eem, 64 Awad, Yousef, 7 al-Awawdah, Mohammed, 228 ‘Awdat al-Rūḥ (The Return of the Spirit [al-Hakim]), 105 ʻAyd, ʻAzīz, 125–26 ‘Azīz, Ṭawfīq, 217 Azmy, Hazem, 6 Backa Theatre, 189, 191 Bahrain, 217 Bahzān, Samīr, 248 Baluchistan, 228 al-Balūshī, ‘Abd al-Ghafūr, 220 Barghouthi, Petra, 166 al-Bāsha, Al-Bāsil Ḥamad, 236 Al-Bassam, Sulayman, 2, 3 bastards. See illegitimacy bayt/abyat, 81, 88, 89, 96 Bedouins, 220–25, 222f Beirut, Lebanon, 184. See also Lebanon Bergman, Eva, 189, 190, 191, 192, 195 Bernhardt, Sarah, 124, 125, 127

Beware of Eve! (Ah Min Ḥawa’), 112 Bin Jawad, Abd-Elkarim Bin Ali, 217 Bin Laden, Osama, 202 Bin Sa‘īd, Qābūs, 216 Braschler, Peter, 156, 157 The Bride (al-‘Arūsa), 128 Al-bukāʾ bayna yaday Zarqāʾ alYamāmah’ (Weeping in Zarqāʾ al-Yamāmah’s Hands), 226 Burton, Richard, 115 Āl Bū Sa‘īd family, 216 Cairo, Egypt, 43, 123–126, 219 Cairo International Festival of Experimental Theatre (1995), 145 Cairo University, 104 cap, 78 Carlson, Marvin, 116, 246 Césaire, Aimé, 18 chapters (suras), 80 Christianity, 184 Christian Levantines, immigration of, 38 Churchill, Winston, 145, 146 civil war (Lebanon), 172–86 Claus, Volkmar, 160 Cleaver, Robert, 115 Cold War, 15, 28 colloquial Arabic (‘āmmiyya), 122, 123, 125, 129, 130, 132, 145 colonialism, 16 Columbia University, 162 Comoros, 228 Conrad, Joseph, 204 cross-cultural encounters, 4 Cyrano de Bergerac (Rostand), 35 Dahsha (Kamāl), 235–51, 248f; characters and plot, 237–39; critical reception of, 248–49; illegitimacy, 242–43; poverty and patriarchy, 243–45; prejudice against women, 245–46; TV script, 239–42, 246–47. See also Kamāl, Abd al-Raḥīm

Index

Dammam Theatre Festival (Saudi Arabia), 218 Dance of the Scorpions (Aboudoma), 13, 14, 25, 26 The Dark Night (al-Layla al-Ḥālika [al-Izkī]), 215–30; 2010 performance, 220–25, 220f, 221f, 224f; social allegories, 225–29 Darragi, Rafik, 6 Debat, Alexis, 202 Débauche, Pierre, 141 decolonization, 153 decommercialising Shakespeare, 35–62 Doctor Othello (Al-Khadim), 144 Doha Players, 198, 202, 203, 208, 210 Driss, Mohamed, 141, 146, 147, 148, 149 Ducis, Jean-François, 19 Dunqūl, Āmal, 225 East Africa, 228 The Economist, 216 Egypt, 1, 4, 5, 16; Alexandria, 3; critical reception of Dahsha (Kamāl), 248–49; Dahsha (Kamāl), 235–51; decommercialising Shakespeare, 36–41; Gamlet, 23–25; illegitimate children, 242; immigration of Christian Levantines, 38; King Lear, 107–10; A ­Midsummer Night’s Dream (­Shakespeare) in, 190–96; poverty and patriarchy, 243–45; prejudice against women, 245–46; Prince Hamlet in conversations, 22; between quadricentennials (1964–2016), 102–18; The T ­ aming of the Shrew, 110–16; Upper Egyptian (Ṣaʿīdī) dialect, 236 Eliot, T.S., 66, 104 Enani, Mohamed, 5, 103, 104, 236 Fadda-Conrey, Carol, 184 al-Fakharānī, Shādī, 246

267

El-Fakharany, Yehia, 108, 110 faqarat, 87 Farag, Alfred, 167 Fariq Kalaib, 197, 198 Fāṭima Rushdī Troupe, 124, 125 festivals, 4 films: Ah Min Ḥawa’ (Beware of Eve!), 112, 114f; Ana Horra (I Am Free!), 112; Gamlet, 16, 17, 23–25; The Taming of the Shrew (film), 115; al-Zawāj (The Marriage), 131 Flute, Francis, 194 folk tales, 38 Folkwang University, 161, 162 France, Anatole, 149 Frederick II, 79, 84 Freedom Theatre of Jenin, Palestine, 188 freelance translators, 37, 38 Fridell, Lena, 193 Friedrich, Paul, 19 ‘Friend of the Students’ (Ṣadīqat al-Ṭalaba), 127 fuṣḥā, 130, 132 al-Gabbāra (The Giantess [Wākīm]) translation, 122, 123–32 Gaber, Lamis, 110 Gamīla (Beautiful), 122 Gamlet, 16, 17, 23–25 Garrigos, Christina, 179 gender, sonnets, 64–66 German Mercator Foundation, 161 Ghalwash, Muhammad, 39 Ghanem, Donia Samir, 111 Ghayth, Hamdi, 55 global interpretations, 27–29 Globe Theater, 154 golden age of politics, 25–27 Graeco-Roman ambiance, 209 Great Britain, 15 Green World, 163 Grotowski, Jerzy, 141 Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), 216–19

268 Index

Gulf Group Theatre, 202 Gulf Theatre Festival, 218 Gulf Youth Theatre Festival (2010), 218 al-Haddad, Najib, 47 hakawati (traditional Arab ­storyteller), 14 al-Hakim, Tawfik, 24 al-Ḥakīm, Ṭawfīq, 105, 106f, 217 Al-Hakim Theatre, 105 Halim, Ahmed Abdel, 107, 108 Hamdi, Muhammad, 44, 45 Hamdis, Ibn, 83 Hamlet at the Taganka (Lyubimov), 27 Hamletmaschine (Müller), 27 Hamlet (‘Abdu) translation, 40 Hamlet (al-Juraydini) translation, 42, 45, 130 Hamlet (Mutran) translation, 46 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 154; Arab appropriation, 19, 21–23; translations, 13–29 Al-Hanager Theatre, 55 Hanna, Sameh, 5 al-Hasan, Hasan ibn, 79 Hassan, Salah D., 172 Hassan, Wail S., 174 Haugbolle, Sune, 183 The Haunted Stage (Carlson), 246 hegemonies, 130 Hennessey, Katherine, 7 Henry VIII (Amin) translation, 39 heroic epics, 38 Hijazi, Salama, 40, 41, 43, 158 Hijazi, Sameh, 156 The History of Palestinian Theatre, 1918–1948 (al-Jawzi), 153, 154, 155 Holderness, Graham, 7, 174 Hout, Syrine, 174 I, The Divine (Alameddine), 173, 174, 179–82, 184, 185 I Am Free! (Ana Horra), 112

Ibraheem, Noha, 8 Ibrahim, George, 163 I Came to See You (Rashed), 188 ‘Iffat, Khalil Pasha, 44, 45 illegitimacy, 242–43 interpretations, global, 27–29 interviews, Lahlou, Nabyl, 255–63 Iraq, 2, 3, 195–96, 201 Islamic State, 227 Ismat, Riyad, 27 Israel/Palestine problem, 203 Italianate Ramsīs Theatre, 126 al-Izkī, Aḥmad, 214–30; 2010 The Dark Night performance, 220–25, 220f, 221f, 224f; Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), 216–19; social allegories and, 225–29 Jabra, Ibrahim Jabra, 24 Al-Janabi, Helen, 188 Jauss, H.R., 19 al-Jawzi, Nasri, 153, 154, 155 Al Jibali, Tawfiq, 141, 144, 146, 149 Jordan, 3 al-Ju’beh, Moaz, 165 Julius Caesar (al-Juraydini) translation, 45 Julius Caesar (Hamdi) translation, 44, 45 Julius Caesar (Ramsīs Troupe) translation, 126 Julius Caesar (Shakespeare), 257 Jund Al-Sham, 202 al-Juraydini, Sami, 42, 45 Kamāl, Abd al-Raḥīm, 235–51; critical reception of Dahsha, 248–49; Dahsha (Kamāl) TV script, 246–47; illegitimacy, 242–43; poverty and patriarchy, 243–45; prejudice against women, 245–46 Al-Kasaba Theatre, 154 Kennedy, Dennis, 210 Al-Khadim, Saad, 144

Index

kharja, 78, 94 kharja (the last phrase), 81 Khayrat, Omar, 248, 249 Khrushchev, Nikita, 16 al-Khuli, Mohammad, 55 khuruj, 94 Khyam, Omar, 205 King Lear (Shakespeare), 173; Dahsha (Kamāl), 235–51; I, The Divine (Alameddine) and, 179–82; quadricentennials (1964–2016), 107–10 Kott, Jan, 19, 27, 205 Kouka, Mohamed, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 149 Kozintsev, Grigorii, 16, 17, 23–25 Kuwait, 217 Lahlou, Nabyl (interview), 255–63 La Presse de Tunisie, 144 the last phrase (kharja), 81 La Tosca (al-Sharif ) translation, 42 al-Layla al-Ḥālika (The Dark Night [al-Izkī]), 215–30; social allegories, 225–29; 2010 performance, 220–25, 220f, 221f, 224f Lebanon, 3, 5; Alameddine, Rabih, 172–86; Shakespeare intertexts and (Alameddine), 182–84 Lentini, Giacomo da, 84, 85, 88, 93, 95, 96 Libya, 3 The Little Prince (Saint-Exupéry), 188 Litvin, Margaret, 5 Al-Kasaba Theatre Academy, 160–67 London Royal Academy of ­Dramatic Arts, 107 Loomba, Ania, 18 Loughrey, Bryan, 7 Lucia Blaga University, 162 al-Lūzī, Yusra, 247 Lyons, Robert, 7 Lyubimov, Yuri, 27

269

al-Ma‘āmarī, Ṭālib, 229 Macbeth (‘Iffat) translation, 44 Macbeth (al-Qadi) translation, 39 Macbeth (Mutran) translation, 46, 48 Macbeth (Salih) translation, 39 Macbeth (Shakespeare), 154, 173, 175–79 Mahmoud, Fatma Moussa, 236 Maralam Theatre, 155 Marowitz, Charles, 246 The Marriage (al-Zawāj), 131 al-Masraḥ (Theatre), 102, 103, 105 al-masrah al-jaddi (serious theatre), 43 McLuskie, Kathleen, 178 The Mechanicals, 164, 165, 166, 193–95 Mehl, Dieter, 173 The Merchant of Venice (Mutran) translation, 46, 47 The Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare), 217 metre, sonnets, 67–69 Mezzi, Faouzia, 144 Michaels, Brian, 163 military atmosphere, 146, 147 Milosz, Czeslaw, 185 misk khitam, 96 Miṣr, 129 Mitāwiʿ, Ḥanān, 246, 247 Moberly, David C, 6 modernity, 161 Moliere, 217 Morocco, 3 Morrison, Conall, 154 Muallem, Edward, 155, 157, 159 Mubarak, Gamal, 108 Mubarak, Hosni, 108, 110 Muhammad ‘Ali, 37 Muḥarram, Musṭafa, 248, 249 al-Mul, Ḍuḥā, 248, 249 Mülheim festival, 158 al-Mulk, Ibn Sana’, 86, 87, 92, 95 Müller, Heiner, 27 al-Muqattam newspaper, 43

270 Index

Mutran, Khalil, 36, 45, 46–53, 54, 55, 124, 144 muwashshah, 78, 79, 80, 81, 84, 86, 87; partitioning, 97–98; rhyming schemes, 87, 88, 89, 90–92, 97; structure of, 87; translations, 99 muwashshahat, length of, 93 al-Nahda (revival), 37 Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 16, 102, 103, 106f. See also Egypt Nasserism, 25 National Theatre, 2 National Theatre (Egypt), 109 Occidental identity, 21 ode (qasīda), 219 Oman, Othello (Shakespeare) in, 214–30 Omani Theatre Festival, 218 Omani Youth Theatre, 217 Ophelia Is Not Dead (Lahlou), 255–63, 260f, 261f oral poetry, 215 Ostermeier, Thomas, 154 Othello (Abyad) translation, 43 Othello (Mutran) translation, 45, 46, 47, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 55, 124 Othello (Shakespeare), 144, 145, 146, 147; The Dark Night (al-Layla al-Ḥālika [al-Izkī]), 215; in Oman, 214–30 O’Toole, Emer, 152, 167 Palestine, 3, 5; Al-Kasaba Theatre Academy, 160–67; Ashtar for Theatre Productions and Training, 155–60; Freedom Theatre of Jenin, 188; Israel/Palestine problem, 203; A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Shakespeare), 152–68; theater in, 153–55 Papini, Brita, 193 Paris Conservatoire, 42 partitioning muwashshah, 97–98

Pasha, Tabuz Zada Husayn Rushdi, 41 Pasternak, Boris, 20 patriarchy, poverty and, 243–45 Petrarch, 83 plays, 1; The Alexandrian Princess (al-Amīra al-Iskandarāniyya [Ṣannū‘]), 123; Dahsha (Kamāl), 235–51; Dance of the Scorpions (Aboudoma), 13, 14; Doctor Othello (Al-Khadim), 144; Gamīla (Beautiful), 122; Hamlet (Shakespeare), 13–29, 154; Hamlet at the Taganka (Lyubimov), 27; Hamlet­ maschine (Müller), 27; I Came to See You (Rashed), 188; Julius Caesar (Shakespeare), 257; King Lear (Shakespeare), 107–10, 173; al-Layla al-Ḥālika (The Dark Night [al-Izkī]), 215–30; Macbeth (Shakespeare), 154, 173; The Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare), 217; A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Shakespeare), 152–68, 157f; Ophelia Is Not Dead (Lahlou), 255–63; Othello (Shakespeare), 144, 145, 146, 147; Richard III (Shakespeare), 2, 3, 142, 143, 144, 145; Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare), 148; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (Stoppard), 15; shadow, 38; The Taming of the Shrew (Shakespeare), 110–16, 121; The Turtles (Amine), 258; Twelfth Night (Shakespeare), 198, 204, 205, 206–8; The Witch (­Sardou), 48. See also translations; specific plays poetry, 219, 222, 223; oral, 215; sonnets in Arabic, 77–100 politics, 17; golden age of, 25–27; Prince Hamlet in conversations, 22

Index

postcolonialism, 2, 18; appropriation, 20; conversations about Hamlet, 22 Potter, Lawrence, 227 poverty and patriarchy, 243–45 prejudice against women, 129–30, 245–46 Printania Theatre (Cairo), 123 Provencal language, 85, 86 al-Qadi, Muhammad ‘Iffat, 39 Al-Qa’eda, 201, 202 qasīda (ode), 219 Qatar, 197, 201, 204, 205, 206–8, 210 Qatar Academy, 210 Qatari Group Theatre, 202 Qatari Riyal (QR), 210 Qatar Petroleum, 197 al-Qays, ‘Umru,’ 99 quadricentennials (1964–2016): Egypt between, 102–18; King Lear, 107–10; The Taming of the Shrew, 110–16 Quantum Leap Approach to Shakespeare, 246 qufl/aqfal, 82, 88, 89, 96 Qur’an, suras (chapters), 80 Quzman, Ibn, 84, 95 racism, 146 Ragab, Said, 191 al-Raḥmān, Yāsir ʿAbd, 248 Raïs, Mohsen, 144 Ramallah Cultural Palace, 154 Ramsīs Theatre (Cairo), 126 Ramzī’, Ibrāhīm, 121–23, 127 Rashed, Karim, 188 religion (ulama), 37 The Return of the Spirit (‘Awdat al-Rūḥ [al-Hakim]), 105 revival (al-Nahda), 37 rewriting, 20 Reza, Yasmina, 149 rhyme, sonnets, 67–69 rhyming schemes, 78, 80, 87, 88; Lentini, Giacomo da, 88, 95,

271

96; muwashshah, 87, 88, 89, 90–92, 97 Richard III (Shakespeare), 2, 3, 142, 143, 144, 145 Riche, Barnabe, 209 The Romance of Antar, 215 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare), 148 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (Stoppard), 15 Rostand, Edmund, 35 Rostom, Hichem, 149 Rouke, Driss, 191 Royal Oman Symphony Orchestra (ROSO), 216 Royal Opera House Muscat, 217f Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), 2, 3 Ruek, Kerry, 200, 201, 210 Rushdī, Fāṭima, 121–39 Rushdi, Rashad, 104, 106f al-sab‘ al-mathani, 80 al-Saber, Samer, 6–7 al-Sabur, Salah ‘Abd, 64 Sadat, Anwar, 16 Ṣadīqat al-Ṭalaba (‘Friend of the Students’), 127 Sadqī, Zaynab, 126 Sa‘īdī school, 217 Salih, Ahmad Muhammad, 39 Al Saliya camp, 201 al-Sama’, ‘Ubada Ibn Ma,’ 85 Ṣannū‘, Ya‘qūb, 123 Sardou, Victorien, 48 Saudi Arabia, 217 sawt, 86 al-Saʿīd, Samāḥ, 247 Ṣaʿīdī (Upper Egyptian) dialect, 236, 242 Schaloske, Charlie, 193 Schmidt, Hans, 163 Seif, Salah Abu, 112 Selaiha, Nehad, 27, 28, 55, 108, 110 September 11, 2001, 2, 141, 203. See also terrorism

272 Index

serious theatre (al-masrah al-jaddi), 43 shadh jiddan (very rare), 97 shadow plays, 38 Shafik, Ahmed, 109f Shakespeare, William, 1, 86; Alameddine, Rabih, 172–86; decommercialising, 35–62; Egypt (turn of the century), 36–41; Egypt between quadricentennials (1964–2016), 102–18; Julius Caesar, 257; plays (see plays); sonnets (see ­sonnets); and terrorism, 197–211; in Tunisia, 141–50 Shakespeare Our Contemporary (Kott), 19, 27 Al-Sham, Jund, 202 Shanghai Theatre Academy, 162 al-Sharif, Hasan, 42 Shaw, Deborah, 3 Shaw, George Bernard, 141 Shawqi, Ahmad, 18, 41, 53 Shi‘a Arabs, 227 Shukrallah, Hala, 114 Sicily, 84, 87 simt, 79, 85, 99 al-Siqilli, Ibn Hamdis, 79, 83 Sīrat ‘Antar ibn Shaddād, 215 Sly, Christopher, 112 Smoktunovsky, Innokenty, 24 social allegories (al-Izkī), 225–29 soliloquies, Gamlet, 23 sonnets, 1, 63–75; in Arabic poetry, 77–100; changing the form, 69–71; gender and tone, 64–66; rhyme and metre, 67–69; rhyming schemes, 78, 80; Sonnet 18, 74–75; Sonnet 73, 71–75; Sonnet 97, 73–74; Sonnet 116, 66; Sonnet 126, 64, 65; Sonnet 127, 65; Sonnet 142, 69–70; Sonnet 143, 67–68, 69; Sonnet 152, 66; Sonnet 154, 64 Soueif, Ahdaf, 26, 27

Soviet Union, 27; collapse of, 28; Gamlet, 23 Spain, 79, 87 status of illegitimate children (Egypt), 242 Stenholm, Bo, 193 Stoppard, Tom, 15 Sufi, 80 al-Sufur literary weekly, 35 The Sultan’s Dilemma (al-Hakim), 24 suras (chapters), 80 Sweden, 188–90, 190–96 Swedish Dramatic Institute (Dramatiska Institutet), 191 Swedish Foreign Aid Authority (SIDA), 191, 192 Syria, 3, 22, 184 Tahrir Square protesters, 109 takhrij, 94 Tales from Shakespeare (Lamb), 21 The Taming of the Shrew (film), 115 The Taming of the Shrew (Ramzī’) translation, 121–23, 127 The Taming of the Shrew (Shakespeare), 110–16 The Taming of the Shrew (Wākīm) translation, 128 tasmit, 99 Tawfiq, Badr, 63 tawshih, 85, 99 Taylor, Elizabeth, 115 Taymur, Muhammad, 35 Taymūr, Sa‘īd ibn, 217 The Tempest (‘Iffat) translation, 44, 45 terrorism, 2, 197–211 Al-Thani, Abdulla, 210 Al-Thani, Hamad bin Khalifa, 210 Thanks, Dear Children (Abnā’ī al-Aʿizāʾ Shukran), 236 Theatre (al-Masraḥ), 102, 103, 105 Theatre Days (Sharja), 218 Theatre of the Oppressed, 156

Index

The Oases of Life (Wāḥāt al-‘umr [Enani]), 104 Todi, Jacopone da, 84, 95 tone, sonnets, 64–66 A Totally Different Person (Wahda Tania Khales), 111 traditional Arab storyteller (­hakawati), 14 tragedies (Shakespeare), 172–86 Tragedy of Cleopatra (Shawqi), 18 translations: first generation of, 37; al-Gabbāra (The Giantess [Wākīm]), 122, 123–32; Hamlet (‘Abdu), 40; Hamlet (al-Juraydini), 42, 45; Hamlet (Mutran), 46; Hamlet (Shakespeare), 13–29; Henry VIII (Amin), 39; Julius Caesar (al-Juraydini), 45; Julius Caesar (Hamdi), 44, 45; Julius Caesar (Ramsīs Troupe), 126; La Tosca (al-Sharif ), 42; Macbeth (‘Iffat), 44; Macbeth (al-Qadi), 39; Macbeth (Mutran), 46, 48; Macbeth (Salih), 39; The Merchant of Venice (Mutran), 46, 47; A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Enani), 103; Mutran, Khalil, 46–53, 54; muwashshah, 80, 81, 99; new norms of, 41–46; Ophelia Is Not Dead (Amine), 255; Othello (Abyad), 43; Othello (Muṭrān), 45, 46, 47, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 55, 124; sonnets (see sonnets); The Taming of the Shrew (Ramzī’), 121–23, 127; The Taming of the Shrew (Shakespeare), 121; The Taming of the Shrew (Wākīm), 128; The Tempest (‘Iffat), 44, 45; The Two Gentlemen of Verona (Ghalwash), 39; The Witch (Antun), 48 translators, 44–46 transsexual relationships, 206

273

Troupe de la Ville de Tunis, 141 Tunis, Le Théâtre Municipal, 149 Tunisia, 3, 141–50; independence of, 141; Othello (Shakespeare), 144, 145, 146, 147; Richard III (Shakespeare), 142, 143, 144 Tunisian colloquial Arabic, 148 Tunisian National Theatre, 148 The Turtles (Amine), 258 al-Tutayli, al-A‘ma, 87 TV scripts, Dahsha (Kamāl), 239–42, 246–47 Twelfth Night (Shakespeare), 198, 204, 205, 206–8 The Two Gentlemen of Verona (Ghalwash) translation, 39 ulama (religion), 37 umma, 227 Une Tempête (Césaire), 18 United Arab Emirates, 217 United Nations Development Programme, 216 United Press International (UPI), 204 United States (US): U.S. Central Command, 201; war on Iraq, 195–96 Upper Egyptian (Ṣaʿīdī) dialect, 236, 242 Vertinskaya, Anastasia, 24 very rare (shadh jiddan), 97 Vitez, Antoine, 141 volta, 94 Wāḥāt al-‘umr (The Oases of Life [Enani]), 104 Wahbī, Yūsuf, 126 Wahda Tania Khales (A Totally Different Person), 111 Wākīm, Bishāra, 122, 123–32, 128, 129 Walker, Martin, 204 Walley, Ismat, 64

274 Index

Wannous, Sa‘dallah, 167 Wars of the Roses, 142 Weber, Carl, 116 Weeping in Zarqāʾ al-Yamāmah’s Hands (Al-bukāʾ bayna yaday Zarqāʾ al-Yamāmah), 226 Western Europe, 15 The Witch (Antun) translation, 48 women: army volunteers, 113f; prejudice against, 245–46 World Shakespeare Congress, 2 World Shakespeare Festival (2012), 3, 152

World War II, 145, 146 Yaghlan, Raouf Ben, 149 Yemen, 3 Youth Theatre Festival (Dubai), 218 Zaghlul, Sa‘d, 42 zajal, 84 Zanzibar, 228 Al-Zarqawi, Abu Musab, 202 al-Zawāj (The Marriage), 131 Zeffirelli, Franco, 115