S1: E1: 'Shall We Be or Not Be?' - Egyptian Adaptations of 'Hamlet'

Season 1: "Sonnets in the Sands" - Arabic Shakespeare

Dive into this episode about Egyptian adaptations of Hamlet in the '60s and '70s, the influence of Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser's presidency on Hamlet as the 'Arab Hero', and the play's resonance in the Arab world!

Transcript

Ahlan wa sahlan [welcome in Arabic] and welcome to Sonnets in the Sands, a global Shakespeare podcast. 

I'm your host, Etta Selim, and today we're diving into the captivating world of Egyptian adaptations of Hamlet. 

So sit back and journey with us into Egypt, where Shakespeare's words find new life and meaning in the heart of the Arab world. 

So a few of you might be wondering why Egypt and what is the connection there with Shakespeare? 

This topic certainly has a personal connection for me that is quite important. 

Although I grew up in London, my father is Egyptian, and I find myself in the rather in-between space of feeling the Egyptian-ness of my identity profoundly, while my father never taught me Arabic, and thus also feeling disconnected from my heritage and my own identity. 

Some of the only experience I've had of conversing with Arab-speaking people were met with disinterest and dismissal as soon as I revealed that I don't speak Arabic. 

There was a palpable sense that I didn't belong. I don't look Egyptian or sound Egyptian or speak Egyptian, and so the Britishness of my speech and my looks relegated me to the other for a lot of Egyptian and simultaneously the rather strict form of my upbringing and my father's patriotic obsession with all things Egyptian, as well as kind of looking back a lot of my neurodivergent traits which were just as intrinsic to me as my heritage, made me somewhat of an oddity and also led me to being othered by the country I grew up in. 

Everything seemed to say that I was already untethered and, you know, no matter how much I tried to tie myself to a British poet, for example, a British identity, my hands would be clumsy, the knots would undo and I would be left adrift still, casting ropes towards two bergs, neither of which would hold me. 

Honestly, I wasn't really sure what I thought about Shakespeare when I started studying it at university and I really felt a disconnect, a sense that my ideas were pretending to be legitimate and that I didn't really belong. 

So I was really pleasantly surprised and a bit overwhelmed actually when, after doing a surface level research gander, literally on a whim about Shakespeare and Egypt, I found that there is in fact a rich Arab tradition of Hamlet plays reaching back many years. 

So I think one of the questions that stands out is: why Hamlet? 

I mean this is a universal thing across all of Shakespeare, where Hamlet is the most adapted, the most rewritten play, but specifically in the Arab world it's cited far more than any other play. 

One of the ways that would be good to examine this is quite a famous example. 

I feel like everyone, no matter how familiar with Shakespeare, knows the phrase “to be or not to be”

For those of you who don't know, that is from Hamlet's famous soliloquy, where he is debating whether it is better to live or die. 

But this phrase is incredibly pertinent to the Arab world and incredibly central. 

It's been used in political protests, in graffiti and even to describe football matches, I found a blog article where the author was talking about a football match that Egyptian headlines had referred to as “the ultimate to be or not to be game”. 

So you can see how this phrase has reverberance across a variety of contexts. 

But I think the example that really stood out to me is the morphing of “to be or not to be into a collective statement”, and specifically with relation to the solidarity of Arab nations. 

In a 1999 column the Egyptian social entrepreneur and media personality Mustafa Mahmoud critiques Arab Muslim inaction on behalf of the oppressed Palestinian people and asks, “Nakun aw la nakun” - “Shall we be or not be?”

Now researching this topic really let me get to know Arabic vicariously and one of the things that I'd forgotten until I Read about this quote is that Arabic doesn't have infinitives so Mahmoud adapts it. 

You can't ask the question to be or not to be without specifying kind of who precisely is doing the being and so it's really interesting that he chooses this collective noun. 

Now Margaret Litvin, an excellent critic by the way, she writes a lot about Arab adaptations and Arab translations of specifically Hamlet but a lot of Shakespeare plays. 

She writes that actually the major literary translations of Hamlet work around this problem and end up choosing different pronouns. 

So actually it's only really in a political ambit that it shows up in that way. 

But as we'll come to see later, the collective nature of political action is a central preoccupation of Arab politics, both in the real world and within the world of Hamlet plays. 

In the same article that Mahmoud writes, he asks of Arab nations lack of action, is it a lack of consciousness? 

So the idea of consciousness in Arab political rhetoric, you know, not only does that tie back to Hamlet itself, because in that to be or not to be speech, he talks about sleeping and death as being rather similar notions. 

And actually the idea of consciousness is really central in our political rhetoric. 

The connotations of awakeness are kind of self-awareness and active participation in the events that are affecting one's fate. 

And the opposite is a trance-like state of dreaming where the individual floats obliviously along history. 

And for hundreds of years the hope that Arab nations will awaken from a long historical unconsciousness has been voiced. 

For example, in the early 20th century, writers endeavoured to awaken an intellectual nada, which literally means an awakening or renaissance. 

So you can see that the ideas of sleep and wakefulness, as well as the ideas of being and collective being are quite central to Arab politics. 

I think that this ties quite well into the trend of the Arab hero Hamlet. 

The renowned Egyptian literary critic Mahmoud El-Shitaoui writes that, with the exception of early productions of Hamlet, Hamlet has always been viewed as a romantic hero who sets out to fight corruption and dies for the cause of justice. 

Now he is talking about the Arab tradition of Hamlet but Why was this the case? 

Why do we have this romantic hero who is fighting political corruption? 

And now I'm going to take a little bit of a trip down memory lane to my childhood and play you a clip of Gommel Abdel Nasser who is the Egyptian president from 1956 until his death in 1970. 

They say heaven is for the poor, but these poor people, Don't they deserve a share in this world? 

They need a smooth share in this world, and then they can give you a piece of heaven. 

OK, so I wanted to play you that clip to give you a glimpse into Nasser’s Egypt and my childhood Egypt. 

I think what stands out for me about Nasser from this clip was his commitment to the rural population of Egypt which led to a palpable sense of community and a sense that he was standing up for the poor. 

Nasser's Egypt had a lot of influence on the Arab hero Hamlet as I'll come to explain, but this clip was also just so familiar to me growing up in the exact format that took. 

My father grew up in Nasser's Egypt and actually he was named after NASSER like many Egyptian boys named Gamal. 

He would play this clip a lot while I was growing up, often on repeat. 

I mean the neurospice had to come from somewhere. And he would sometimes with so much palpable emotion and vocal tremors even translate NASSER's words line by line exactly as I have just done for you. 

Revisiting this clip was poignant but also a very surreal experience. 

I was confounded by the litany of monochrome clips of the president on YouTube and I was very worried that I wouldn't be able to recognize the exact one I wanted since I don't speak any Arabic but within the first few seconds of playing this clip at random I knew that this was the one from my childhood. 

Sounds have always stuck with me more than anything else and I suppose this clip was so often repeated that it was a latent memory for me. 

So I played you that to give you an idea of what Nasser stood for. 

Much like a lot of Egyptians, my father idealized Nasser power and authority and the civil unity and the utopia that he wished for the country. 

Nasser's death in 1970 left behind a complex tapestry of emotions throughout Egypt and the Arab world. 

Some hailed him as a visionary leader, while others criticised his authoritarian tendencies. 

Even today, opinions remain divided, many, including my father, mourn Nasser as a father figure, lamenting the loss of their dreams for a just and progressive society which they believe died with him. 

His regime presented a political idealism that captivated the Arab imagination, yet his authoritarian, militaristic actions and disbanding of political dissent often defied easy categorisation. 

Nasser, in a sense, defied conventional roles. He wasn't quite the heroic Hamlet, nor the usurping Claudius. 

Instead he occupied a spectral space and Margaret Litvin again describes his presence as being similar to Hamlet's father's ghost or inspiring and continuing to haunt the Arab political landscape. 

Why have I played this exact clip for a discussion of Hamlet, though? 

Egypt, at this point, during Nasser’s presidency, was a nation on the centre of the world's stage in many aspects. 

The unique set of circumstances that surfaced during his rule, the Cold War, anti-colonialism, the Egyptian Revolution and the growth of and resistance to Soviet power in Eastern Europe, all contributed to the idea of the Arab hero Hamlet. 

The Ministry of Culture in Egypt promoted theatre as a political platform and dissenting voices often had to cloak their critiques in metaphor while Nasser's foreign policy opened doors to Soviet and Eastern European cultural influences. 

Additionally, his Pan-Arab vision helped spread Egyptian culture across the entire Arab world. 

Nasser's public rhetoric also had a hand in this transformation, which did temporarily make the Egyptian people feel like they were intimately involved and engaged in significant decisions about heroism, power and justice. 

These circumstances, as well as Nasser's revolution, were decisive in the development of the trend of Hamlet as a political hero who seeks justice and is brutally martyred by an oppressive regime. 

Margaret Litvin has a really lovely way of expressing that these plays are not aiming merely to Arabize Shakespeare's text, instead she says, The playwrights were aiming to hamletize their Arab Muslim protagonists, portraying them as credible political figures. 

What I think is the most interesting shift, however, is in the post-1975 plays. 

The Arab trend in the post-1975 adaptation takes the trend of the Arab hero Hamlet and transforms him into this really indecisive, weak-willed character who is incapable of recognizing a lot of the oppression before him. 

Often the character has the lack of consciousness that we've referenced before in terms of Arab politics. 

He floats through the stage seemingly oblivious to everything happening around him and cannot actually fight against it. 

These adaptations carve out new space for cultural and political commentary and they echo the complexities of the Arab world post-Nasser but also form a kind of requiem for his presidency. 

I'm going to tell you about a really interesting play by the Egyptian author Mahmoud Aboudouma written in the 1980s and it is called Dance of the Scorpions. 

Aboudouma's play is fascinating because he acknowledges that he had never read Shakespeare's play in English when he wrote Dance of the Scorpions. 

In an emir exchange with Margaret Litvin, he writes that when he was young he saw a Russian black and white film, Gamlet, with no Arabic subtitles. 

Gamlet is a Russian adaptation of Hamlet. In Abodouma's words, like a deaf young man, he saw this film more than ten times. 

He did engage with a translation of Hamlet at some point in his life, but he describes the way he wrote the play in a way that orients itself more firmly with the visual understanding of Gamlet. 

Interestingly, he writes that many details about this play are very different from Shakespeare's Hamlet as we might know him. 

There are five characters who carry Shakespearean names Hamlet, Horatio, Claudius, Polonius and the Ghost but many ingredients are altered and absent. 

It's a one-act play, there are only five scenes, and there is no Gertrude or Ophelia, there are no Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, there are no players, there is no metaphysics, and there is no poetry. 

This really strips back the play to become something quite bleak. 

Importantly, Aboudouma's protagonist isn't eloquent at all and actually doesn't have a deep sense of consciousness in the usual sense that Hamlet would have. 

Her ratio is transformed into a traditional Arab storyteller known as A hakawati and he opens the play by directly addressing the audience. 

He says, Honoured ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce myself to you. 

I am Horatio, Hamlet's friend, whom he entrusted to tell you his story. 

I've been telling it for five centuries and finally I got bored telling it the same way every night. 

Therefore I will try tonight to tell it to you in a different way. 

Now This clever self-aware quip reminds the audience of the original story as well as the many, many adaptations that have come before, and it sets the stage for Abouduoma's unique interpretation by distinguishing this performance from previous ones. 

Now, I think probably the most interesting thing about this is that Claudius becomes the central character. 

Claudius is the king who kills Hamlet's father in Shakespeare's original play and becomes king of Denmark. 

In this play he is a tyrant who conspires with the foreign enemy Fortinbras and rigs a fake war that sidelines his political opponents and defrauds his people. 

I think perhaps the most uncanny scene that really emphasises Claudius' tyranny is the rather bizarre Council of Nobles. 

Claudius brings a group of nobles on stage for a war council, but the stage directions tell us that these are not human, but are simply paper dummies. 

During the meeting of this imaginary Council, Hamlet tries to expose the ministers as paper dolls and says, enough! 

What's happening? What's the stupid buffoonery? Where are the nobles you're talking to, King? If these dolls are human, let me hear their voices. 

Claudius is completely impervious to Hamlet's increasingly desperate demands, and he warns Hamlet not to mock the cabinet, and the puppet show continues undisrupted. 

So this puppet show is quite uncanny, but a little bit humorous. 

I think if I were in the audience I would probably be tempted to laugh, but it is also really insidious. 

The only people who acknowledge that the puppet shows fools are the audience who can see the dolls on stage and Hamlet who cries out against them but it's Claudius's word that creates the only reality in the play and it's the only reality that's permitted. 

He holds the ultimate power to silence his critics. 

The writer Lisa Wedeen writes about Syrian politics that the regime's power resides in its ability to impose national fictions and to make people say and do what they otherwise would not. 

So the implausibility of fictions like Claudius' in The Dance of the Scorpions is part of the point. 

It's almost an Orwellian attempt to make these people declare that 2 plus 2 is 5. 

I think there's also a really interesting contrast to Shakespeare's Hamlet. 

So in that play it's Hamlet himself who stages a theatre production for Claudius to try and get him to reveal his guilt so that then he feels a little bit better about going and murdering his uncle. 

But here it's the reverse. It's Claudius who places Hamlet in this theatrical scenario, in this false scene of puppets. 

I think that very much emphasises the shift in power that happens in these post-1975 plays. 

These adaptations write back to the long tradition of the Arab hero, which posits Hamlet as a rebel figure who fights and succeeds against political injustice, the texts almost borrow Hamlet's authority to shine a light on contemporary Arab politics. 

If we examine the Hamlet character himself, It could be argued that the drastic inefficacy of him as a protagonist is almost a call to action for the audience and an attempt to inspire change, but Hamlet's helplessness seems to have almost the opposite effect. 

Claudius fills the vacuum that is created by Hamlet's complete inability to act and his triumph is complete which reveals the futility of any political action. 

You see a radical departure from the tradition of both Shakespeare's text and also of Hamlet as this heroic Arab hero. 

The litany of Arab hero plays during a time of hope, during Nasser's reign, stagnated into a time of political frustration and circularity, and as the Arab world grapples with its political landscape and the Arab Spring movements work to enact change and freedom even in the face of political oppression and widespread corruption. 

The question, shall we be or not be, “nakun aw la nakun” reverberates throughout these plays. 

It urges the audience to confront the futilities of collective action. 

Reshaping Hamlet plays means that Arab playwrights can navigate the landscape of disillusionment that is palpable after Nasr's death, and it echoes the harsh realities of Arab politics while interrogating the very powers that have created this despair. 

And I can't help but think of my father. He left Egypt in his 20s, completely overwhelmed by the corruption and the lack of change on a systemic level. 

Nasser's influence remains in the black and white, increasingly pixelated clips that you find on YouTube, and the litany of comments below blessing him and saying that there is no hope anymore. 

These post-1975 plays really echo something that is felt quite strongly across the Arab world and something that my father definitely felt. 

But I still like to hope as I push my Shakespeare studies further and as I carve out space for myself in my world, then regardless of the futility, regardless of the insidious power dynamics that they perpetuate, these plays still do something quite important. 

They diverge from Shakespeare and invert it in a way that achieves a reality that is fragmented. 

They decolonise Hamlet as Shakespeare's British colonial work. 

Shukran [thank you in Arabic], everyone. Thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed today's episode where we talked about Egyptian adaptations of Hamlet and their resonance with the presidency of Gamal Abdel Nasser. 

Before we go, I want to extend a heartfelt thank you to my father for his profound influence on my upbringing, his love for literature and culture has really inspired this journey and he continues to guide me every step of my way. 

I'd like to thank my English tutor, Dr. Laura Seymour, for all of her help and support in inspiring me to make this episode about something so close to me. 

And I'd also like to thank Dr. Varsha Panjwani for all her support in podcast seminars and for inspiring me to make a podcast about my space in Shakespeare. 

This is Sonnets in the Sands, signing off with a heartfelt salaam [bye/go safely in Arabic].