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.

This volume brings together a selection of papers in linguistics presented at the 13th edition of the Conference on British and American Studies. Structured into three chapters, the studies included here are illustrative for the different perspectives, methodologies, and research traditions in the investigation of language-related phenomena. The first chapter, “Language Change and Cross-Linguistic Analysis”, is mainly concerned with the external and internal catalysts for language change, and with a number of morphosyntactic and semantic particularities of Romanian, set in contrast with other languages. Aspects related to first or second language learning and language as an instrument of thought form the content of the second chapter, “Language Acquisition, Teaching and Processing”. The focus of the final chapter, “Pragmatics, Translation, and the Negotiation of Meaning”, is language as an instrument of power and (self-)communication.

The Shakespearean World takes a global view of Shakespeare and his works, especially their afterlives. Constantly changing, the Shakespeare central to this volume has acquired an array of meanings over the past four centuries. "Shakespeare" signifies the historical person, as well as the plays and verse attributed to him. It also signifies the attitudes towards both author and works determined by their receptions. Throughout the book, specialists aim to situate Shakespeare’s world and what the world is because of him. In adopting a global perspective, the volume arranges thirty-six chapters in five parts: Shakespeare on stage internationally since the late seventeenth century; Shakespeare on film throughout the world; Shakespeare in the arts beyond drama and performance; Shakespeare in everyday life; Shakespeare and critical practice. Through its coverage, The Shakespearean World offers a comprehensive transhistorical and international view of the ways this Shakespeare has not only influenced but has also been influenced by diverse cultures during 400 years of performance, adaptation, criticism, and citation. While each chapter is a freshly conceived introduction to a significant topic, all of the chapters move beyond the level of survey, suggesting new directions in Shakespeare studies – such as ecology, tourism, and new media – and making substantial contributions to the field. This volume is an essential resource for all those studying Shakespeare, from beginners to advanced specialists.

This addition to the Shakespeare on Screen series reveals the remarkable presence of Macbeth in the global Shakespearean screenscape. What is it about Macbeth that is capable of extending beyond Scottish contexts and speaking globally, locally and “glocally”? Does the extensive adaptive reframing ofMacbeth suggest the paradoxical irrelevance of the original play? After examining the evident topic of the supernatural elements—the witches and the ghost—in the films, the essays move from a revisitation of the well-known American screen versions, to an analysis of more recent Anglophone productions and to world cinema (Asia, France, South Africa, India, Japan, etc.). Questions of lineage and progeny are broached, then extended into the wider issues of gender. Finally, ballet remediations, filmic appropriations, citations and mises-en-abyme of Macbeth are examined, and the book ends with an analysis of a Macbeth script that never reached the screen. Ce nouvel ouvrage de la série « Shakespeare à l’écran » révèle la présence remarquable de Macbeth dans le paysage filmique shakespearien à l’échelle mondiale. Comment expliquer qu’une pièce dont l’intrigue est ancrée dans une nation, l’Écosse, ait pu être absorbée par des cultures aussi diverses ? Les multiples adaptations de Macbeth suggèrent-elles, de manière paradoxale, une moindre pertinence de la pièce originelle ? Après avoir exploré la représentation des éléments surnaturels (les sorcières et le fantôme), le volume revisite les films américains « canoniques », les productions anglophones plus récentes et les versions d’autres aires culturelles (Asie, France, Afrique du Sud, Inde, Japon, etc.) Les questions de lignée et de descendance sont abordées, puis prolongées dans des articles sur la représentation du genre. Les versions dansées, les appropriations, les citations et les mises en abyme de Macbeth sont ensuite analysées, et ce parcours mène à un étrange objet – un scénario non filmé.

For its eighteenth volume, The Shakespearean International Yearbook surveys the present state of Shakespeare studies, addressing issues that are fundamental to our interpretive encounter with Shakespeare’s work and his time, across the whole spectrum of his literary output. Contributions are solicited from among the most active and insightful scholars in the field, from both hemispheres of the globe. New trends are evaluated from the point of view of established scholarship, and emerging work in the field is encouraged. Each issue includes a special section under the guidance of a specialist guest editor, along with coverage of the current state of the field. An essential reference tool for scholars of early modern literature and culture, this annual publication captures, from year to year, current and developing thought in Shakespeare scholarship and theater practice worldwide. There is a particular emphasis on Shakespeare studies in global contexts.

A concise guide to global performances of Shakespeare, this volume combines methodologies of dramaturgy, film and performance studies, critical race and gender studies and anthropological thick description. This companion guides students from critical methodologies through big pictures of global Shakespeare to case studies that employ these methodologies. It uses a site-specific lens to examine global performances of Shakespeare on stage, on radio and on screen. As well as featuring methodological chapters on modernist adaptations, global cinema, multilingual productions and Shakespeare in translation, the volume includes short histories of adaptations of Shakespeare in Southeast Asia, Latin America, the Arab world, India, the Slavic world, Iran, Afghanistan and the Farsi-speaking diaspora. It uses these micro-historical narratives to demonstrate the value of local knowledge by analysing the relationships between Shakespeare and his modern interlocutors. Finally, thematically organized case studies apply the methodologies to analyse key productions in Brazil, Korea, Yemen, Kuwait, China and elsewhere. The final chapter considers pedagogical strategies in a global setting. These chapters showcase the how of global Shakespeare studies: how do minoritized artists and audiences engage with Shakespeare? And how do we analyse the diverse and polyphonic performances with an eye towards equity and social justice?

In this pioneering history of transportation and communication in the modern Middle East, On Barak argues that contrary to accepted wisdom technological modernity in Egypt did not drive a sense of time focused on standardization only. Surprisingly, the introduction of the steamer, railway, telegraph, tramway, and telephone in colonial Egypt actually triggered the development of unique timekeeping practices that resignified and subverted the typical modernist infatuation with expediency and promptness. These countertempos, predicated on uneasiness over “dehumanizing” European standards of efficiency, sprang from and contributed to non-linear modes of arranging time. Barak shows how these countertempos formed and developed with each new technological innovation during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, contributing to a particularly Egyptian sense of time that extends into the present day, exerting influence over contemporary political language in the Arab world. The universal notion of a modern mechanical standard time and the deviations supposedly characterizing non-Western settings “from time immemorial,” On Time provocatively argues, were in fact mutually constitutive and mutually reinforcing.

Hamlet remains the most-studied of all Shakespeare's great tragedies. This collection of newly-commissioned essays gives readers an overview of past critical views of the play as well as new writing about the play from today's leading scholars. The range of perspectives offered makes the book an invaluable companion to anyone studying the play at an advanced level. The final chapter on learning and teaching resources is particularly useful as a guide for further study.

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Tragedy presents fifty-four essays by a range of scholars from all parts of the world. Together these essays offer readers a fresh and comprehensive understanding of Shakespeare tragedies as both works of literature and as performance texts written by a playwright who was himself an experienced actor. The opening section explores ways in which later generations of critics have shaped our idea of 'Shakespearean' tragedy, and addresses questions of genre by examining the playwright's inheritance from the classical and medieval past. The second section is devoted to current textual issues, while the third offers new critical readings of each of the tragedies. This is set beside a group of essays that deal with performance history, with screen productions, and with versions devised for the operatic stage, as well as with twentieth and twenty-first century re-workings of Shakespearean tragedy. The book's final section expands readers' awareness of Shakespeare's global reach, tracing histories of criticism and performance across Europe, the Americas, Australasia, the Middle East, Africa, India, and East Asia.