Shakespeare in the Arab Jordanian Consciousness: Shylock in the Poetry of ʿArār (Mustafa Wahbi Al-Tal)

Hussein A Alhawamdeh,Ismail Suliman Almazaidah

doi:10.13169/arabstudquar.40.4.0319

Abstract

Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice has been reimagined, adapted, and appropriated by Arab playwrights and poets. The Arab Jordanian poet ʿArār (Mustafa Wahbi Al-Tal; 1897–1949) appropriates Shakespeare's anti-archetype of the figure of the Jew, Shylock, to criticize two local issues in the early twentieth-century context in Jordan and Palestine. First, the phenomenon of money-lending by Jordanian merchants, which led to the confiscation of the poor peasants' lands in the early twentieth century. Second, the condemnation of Zionism and its association with Western colonialism. Shakespeare's Shylock, on one hand, is recreated as a Jordanian Shylock, who is a usurer, and, on the other, as a Zionist Shylock. This remoulding of Shakespeare's Shylock as an Arab and Zionist reveals the post-Shakespeare Arab audience's new perception of The Merchant of Venice as a play about the political and behavioral affiliations of Shylock rather than about his Jewish ethnicity.

Highlights

The Arab world was never on the travel ban list for Shakespeare’s world
Shakespeare has been adapted, appropriated, revised, reshaped, and invited by Arab writers to share with them the discussion of local issues
Litvin argues that Shakespeare was not transported to the Arab world by the British colonizer but via various sources: “Arab audiences came to know Shakespeare through a kaleidoscopic array of Hussein A

Summary

Introduction

The Arab world was never on the travel ban list for Shakespeare’s world. Shakespeare appears in Arab literature, media, and politics since the late nineteenth century.[1]. Mahmoud Al-Shetawi, tracing the adaptation and appropriation of The Merchant of Venice in Arabic literature, points briefly toArār’s appropriation of Shylock to condemn usury: “in a poem censuring money-lenders in his native Jordan Mustafa Wahbi al-Tal derogatively associates them with Shakespeare’s notorious usurer, Shylock.”[5] Al-Shetawi’s article lacks contextualization of the phenomenon of money-lending and usury in Jordan in the early twentieth century and does not refer toArār’s other poems that condemn Zionism and the British Mandate of Jordan (1921–46). In Said’s perception, appropriation represents a form of cultural resistance and humanist universalism. ʿArār takes a “voyage in” the Shakespearean discourse to form new shapes of critique to the local and Arab regional context

Shakespeare in Appropriation

Because they were poor and weak

Complaining of what he had received in the palace of justice

If I am taken away?