TY - JOUR
AU - Dadabhoy, Ambereen
AB - Katherine Hennessey’s Shakespeare on the Arabian Peninsula offers a necessary intervention in the field of Shakespeare and Islamicate geographies. Not only does Hennessey shift the ambit of critical inquiry into Islamicate worlds away from the Mediterranean and toward the Arabian Peninsula, but her study also exposes the need for scholarly investigation into contemporary pedagogical and performance practices: each of the societies and cultures of the Peninsula offers its own specific challenges, and attendant rewards, in its approach to Shakespeare’s plays. Situated within the “global” turn in Shakespeare studies, Hennessey’s book also interrogates the methods that undergird global-Shakespeare methodologies, especially those that might put Shakespeare rather than the geographies and cultures producing the work at the center. Shakespeare on the Arabian Peninsula takes as its charge the vital task of uncovering this region for non-Gulf audiences. Hennessey bounds her study within seven specific nation-states that occupy the region of the Arabian Peninsula: Yemen, Oman, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) (19). This tight geographic focus allows Hennessey to present the social, cultural, and political complexities of the region as a whole while attending to local mores and norms particular to each state. The ethnographic information she provides demonstrates both how Shakespeare might challenge cultural traditions and orthodoxy and how his plays escape censure because of the “cover” provided by their cultural capital. The thick description Hennessey mobilizes to traverse the region supports the central claim of Shakespeare on the Arabian Peninsula: that Shakespeare functions as an object around which new communities can form, communities that cross the visible and invisible borders of language, class, ethnicity, citizenship, and gender. Such communities are, according to Hennessey, “the new local,” which “redefines the state of belonging to a particular locale” (32). The troupes that she discusses in the context of “the new local,” simultaneously “embrace and embody heterogeneity and diverse modes of belonging, both on stage and in their interactions with each other offstage” (32). Hennessey’s argument throughout Shakespeare on the Arabian Peninsula, then, is as much about the cultures, societies, and peoples of the Arabian Peninsula as it is about Shakespeare. The necessary intervention of Shakespeare on the Arabian Peninsula is best exemplified by a late chapter in the study, “Respecting Difference: Shakespeare in Oman, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia.” Here, Hennessey exposes the transformative potential of Shakespeare in Arabic and the capacious understanding of what is “Shakespeare and Shakespearean” within this context. Examples include Ahmad al-Izki’s reconfiguration of Othello, The Dark Knight, in which Shakespeare is put in dialogue with medieval and pre-Islamic Arab romance to dramatize and interrogate problems of racial belonging; and a rehearsal of The Merchant of Venice in Yemen that evacuates the anti-Semitism of the text by making Shylock a Muslim. These transformations provide a new sense not only of the “universality” of Shakespeare, but also of the creative potentiality of global manipulations of Shakespeare, which turn his own local and particular concerns into ones that can reflect other or “new” locales. Hennessey’s analysis of The Dark Knight, in particular, makes an important contribution to both global Shakespeare studies and to critical race studies by focusing on the Arabian source text, The Romance of Antar (525–608 CE), and discussing the complex and contingent ways in which race manifests in that text and its relation to Shakespeare’s Moor, whose genesis is also rooted in the romance genre. Interweaving characters from Shakespeare and Antar, al-Izki creates a hybrid drama that interrogates race, religion, and history in order to expose the contingency and importance of social and cultural belonging in a geography (Oman) where all of these issues are magnified and heightened by political restriction. Hennessey’s compelling analysis demonstrates the rigorous ways in which Gulf productions interrogate their societies through Shakespeare. Hennessey eschews Orientalist constructions of the region in Shakespeare on the Arabian Peninsula, but she does not overlook the political repression of some of the regimes on the Peninsula and their efforts to quell the protests of the Arab Spring, which spread across much of the Arab World during the period under consideration. Indeed, the political realities on the ground, especially the strict censorship of texts and performances and the institutionalized sex-segregation of these societies, present significant difficulties for teaching and performing Shakespeare on the Peninsula. Nevertheless, as Hennessey makes abundantly clear, rich, beautiful, provocative, compelling, and boundary-pushing art is possible. This important study should appeal to scholars interested in expanding the boundaries of global Shakespeare, those who study Shakespearean performance outside of Anglophone traditions, theater practitioners, and scholars of the contemporary Middle East. Shakespeare on the Arabian Peninsula is expansive in its scope and deserves a similarly broad readership. © Folger Shakespeare Library 2021. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Shakespeare on the Arabian Peninsula. By Katherine Hennessey
JF - Shakespeare Quarterly
DO - 10.1093/sq/quab004
DA - 2021-04-16
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/shakespeare-on-the-arabian-peninsula-by-katherine-hennessey-jESNhOoCON
SP - 1
EP - 1
VL - Advance Article
IS - 
DP - DeepDyve
ER -