Offering a variety of perspectives on the history and role of Arab Shakespeare translation, production, adaptation and criticism, this volume explores both international and locally focused Arab/ic appropriations of Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets. In addition to Egyptian and Palestinian theatre, the contributors to this collection examine everything from an Omani performance in Qatar and an Upper Egyptian television series to the origin of the sonnets to an English-language novel about the Lebanese civil war. Addressing materials produced in several languages from literary Arabic (fuṣḥā) and Egyptian colloquial Arabic (‘ammiyya) to Swedish and French, these scholars and translators vary in discipline and origin, and together exhibit the diversity and vibrancy of this field.

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

Sulayman Al Bassam is one of the world's leading contemporary dramatists. His adaptations of Shakespeare, performed around the world, have won many awards and met with widespread acclaim on four continents. This volume brings together for the first time three of Al Bassam's adaptations of Shakespearean plays - including versions of Hamlet, Richard III and Twelfth Night - collectively known as The Arab Shakespeare Trilogy. The Al-Hamlet Summit sees the familiar characters of Hamlet reborn as delegates placed in a conference room in an unnamed modern Arab state on the brink of war; Richard III: an Arab Tragedy is a contemporary adaptation of Shakespeare's classic, reworked and transplanted into the scorching oil-rich Islamic world of the Gulf; while The Speaker's Progress is a forensic reconstruction of Twelfth Night which transforms into an unequivocal act of defiance towards the state, forming a dark satire on the decades of hopelessness and political inertia that fed twenty-first-century revolts across the Arab region. The Arab Shakespeare Trilogy features an editorial introduction by Graham Holderness, positioning the plays within the contexts of both modern Shakespearean drama and Arab culture as well as an author's preface by Sulayman Al Bassam, detailing the plays' history of theatrical reception and outlining his philosophy of Shakespeare adaptation.

Since the turn of the millennium, the Arabian Peninsula has produced a remarkable series of adaptations of Shakespeare. These include a 2007 production of Much Ado About Nothing, set in Kuwait in 1898; a 2011 performance in Sharjah of Macbeth, set in 9th-century Arabia; a 2013 Yemeni adaptation of The Merchant of Venice, in which the Shylock figure is not Jewish; and Hamlet, Get Out of My Head, a one-man show about an actor’s fraught response to the Danish prince, which has been touring the cities of Saudi Arabia since 2014. This groundbreaking study surveys the surprising history of Shakespeare on the Arabian Peninsula, situating the current flourishing of Shakespearean performance and adaptation within the region’s complex, cosmopolitan, and rapidly changing socio-political contexts. Through first-hand performance reviews, interviews, and analysis of resources in Arabic and English, this volume brings to light the ways in which local theatremakers, students, and scholars use Shakespeare to address urgent regional issues like authoritarianism, censorship, racial discrimination and gender inequality.

The first fifty volumes of this yearbook of Shakespeare studies are being reissued in paperback.

Sulayman Al Bassam is one of the world's leading contemporary dramatists. His adaptations of Shakespeare, performed around the world, have won many awards and met with widespread acclaim on four continents. This volume brings together for the first time three of Al Bassam's adaptations of Shakespearean plays - including versions of Hamlet, Richard III and Twelfth Night - collectively known as The Arab Shakespeare Trilogy. The Al-Hamlet Summit sees the familiar characters of Hamlet reborn as delegates placed in a conference room in an unnamed modern Arab state on the brink of war; Richard III: an Arab Tragedy is a contemporary adaptation of Shakespeare's classic, reworked and transplanted into the scorching oil-rich Islamic world of the Gulf; while The Speaker's Progress is a forensic reconstruction of Twelfth Night which transforms into an unequivocal act of defiance towards the state, forming a dark satire on the decades of hopelessness and political inertia that fed twenty-first-century revolts across the Arab region. The Arab Shakespeare Trilogy features an editorial introduction by Graham Holderness, positioning the plays within the contexts of both modern Shakespearean drama and Arab culture as well as an author's preface by Sulayman Al Bassam, detailing the plays' history of theatrical reception and outlining his philosophy of Shakespeare adaptation.