Shakespeare and the Arab World

Part I

Critical Approaches

Translation Strategies

Chapter 1

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 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.

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

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

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 late-1980s 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 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 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 Shakespeare experiences do both, in subtle ways: for example, the 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.

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 neoclassical 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 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 indifference 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 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 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, 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 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