Hamlet's Arab journey : Shakespeare's prince and Nasser's ghost / Margaret Litvin.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Litvin, Margaret, 1974-

Series:

Translation/transnation.

Translation/transnation

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616. Hamlet.

Shakespeare, William.

Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616--Appreciation--Arab countries.

Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616--Translations into Arabic--History and criticism.

Hamlet (Legendary character).

Heroes in literature.

Politics in literature.

Arabic drama--Egypt--History and criticism.

Arabic drama.

Arabic drama--20th century--History and criticism.

Egypt--Civilization--English influences.

Egypt.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (292 p.)

Edition:

Course Book

Place of Publication:

Princeton : Princeton University Press, c2011.

Language Note:

English

System Details:

Mode of access: World Wide Web.

Summary:

For the past five decades, Arab intellectuals have seen themselves in Shakespeare's Hamlet: their times "out of joint," their political hopes frustrated by a corrupt older generation. Hamlet's Arab Journey traces the uses of Hamlet in Arabic theatre and political rhetoric, and asks how Shakespeare's play developed into a musical with a happy ending in 1901 and grew to become the most obsessively "ed literary work in Arab politics today. Explaining the Arab Hamlet tradition, Margaret Litvin also illuminates the "to be or not to be" politics that have turned Shakespeare's tragedy into the essential Arab political text, cited by Arab liberals, nationalists, and Islamists alike. On the Arab stage, Hamlet has been an operetta hero, a firebrand revolutionary, and a muzzled dissident. Analyzing productions from Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, and Kuwait, Litvin follows the distinct phases of Hamlet's naturalization as an Arab. Her fine-grained theatre history uses personal interviews as well as scripts and videos, reviews, and detailed comparisons with French and Russian Hamlets. The result shows Arab theatre in a new light. Litvin identifies the French source of the earliest Arabic Hamlet, shows the outsize influence of Soviet and East European Shakespeare, and explores the deep cultural link between Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser and the ghost of Hamlet's father. Documenting how global sources and models helped nurture a distinct Arab Hamlet tradition, Hamlet's Arab Journey represents a new approach to the study of international Shakespeare appropriation.Some images inside the book are unavailable due to digital copyright restrictions.

Contents:

Introduction

Hamlet in the daily discourse of Arab identity

Nasser's dramatic imagination, 1952-64

The global kaleidoscope: how Egyptians got their Hamlet, 1901-64

Hamletizing the Arab Muslim hero, 1964-67

Time out of joint, 1967-76

Six plays in search of a protagonist, 1976-2002

Epilogue : Hamlets without Hamlet.

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 08. Jul 2019)

ISBN:

1-283-28068-X

9786613280688

1-4008-4010-4

OCLC:

758333964