“SHALL WE BE OR NOT BE?”: THE QUESTION OF NATIONALISTIC AND FEMALE IDENTITY IN ARAB APPROPRIATIONS OF SHAKESPEARE

Abstract

In 1999, Mustafa Mahmoud, a famous Arab activist and thinker, raised the question: “Shall we be or not be?” in his newspaper column critique. Mahmoud identified the Arab dilemma as a tendency to fight over trivial things rather than meaningful political objectives, such as the importance of finding an acceptable status among the leading countries in the world. Mahmoud cites the first line of one of Shakespeare’s most famous soliloquies to ask a question that challenges Arab citizens to develop a collective national identity. While there has been much critical debate about what this line of inquiry means in the character of Hamlet, what has been neglected is how this phrase has been rephrased or re-termed in the Arab world as a cultural sign of a portent loss of masculinity, a loss of identity, and the suppressed role of women. The connection between Hamlet and the Arab people comes from the widely known and accepted idea that the Arab world (as a whole) has and is living through a period of a painful transition. Both the transition and the pain are usually blamed on “the bulldozer force of western-driven modernity” (Litvin 18). The purpose of my dissertation is two-fold: 1) to examine how Shakespeare is appropriated in the Arab world to comment on politics and to give voice to problems, possibilities, and questions of identity that, without him, might have remained unexpressed; and 2) to speculate how Shakespeare is used in the Arab world to reveal the need for women’s empowerment. The originality of my dissertation lies in two directions: 1) while there has been much conversation about Shakespeare’s translations and appropriations in Arabic, there have been very few articles written in English to position this argument within Western criticism; 2) While in the Arab world there have been multiple works that dealt with politics in these Arabic appropriations of Shakespeare, there have been none or very few that have discussed the female representations in Arabic appropriations of Shakespeare. The reason why Arab playwrights and directors specifically adapt Shakespeare rather than more classical Arabic texts to comment on the Arab political crisis is because they encode critique rather than explicitly reveal it. This dissertation makes the following contributions: it reevaluates and theorizes the field of Shakespeare’s Arabic appropriations; it considers the role of Arab writers’ persistent use of Shakespeare’s question “shall we be or not be?” in terms of how it affects imperial politics and society in the rise of Egyptian theater and film; it analyzes its function of teaching a female audience about the role they can perform to make a political change. This will be represented through several case studies that deal with the cultural problems of appropriating Shakespeare into Egyptian performances and cinema, most extensively with the film productions based on Hamlet as Youssef Chahine’s Alexandria Why? (1979). The Arab theatrical productions on the same play are Mamduh Adwan’s Hamlet Wakes Up Late (1976), and Sulayman Al-Bassam’s The Al-Hamlet Summit (2004). There are two cinematic productions on The Taming of the Shrew that I will consider: Fatin Abdel Wahab’s Beware of Eve (1962) and Inaas Aldigidi’s Lobster (1996). These appropriations examine how Shakespeare, speaking through Arab texts, can help Arab women in the search for a native expression that can showcase their agency and identity.