This article attempts to document and examine the corpus of Arabic and Islamic allusions and references in Shakespeare’s drama and poetry in line with postcolonial discourse and theory. The works of Shakespeare incorporate a large body of Arabic/Islamic matters, which the Bard has gleaned from different sources, such as travel literature, narratives of pilgrims, history annals and common tales of the Crusaders. However, these matters are sporadic in Shakespeare’s works, woven into the fabric of various plays and poems. For example, Shakespeare has thematically used a set of allusions and references to the Arab world such as Arabian trees, the Prophet Mohammed, the Turk, Aleppo, Jerusalem, and many others. Shakespeare has also presented three Oriental characters in his plays: the Prince of Morocco, Shylock and Othello, each with distinctive ethnic and personal traits. A scrutiny of Arabic and Islamic matters in the works of Shakespeare from postcolonial critical perspectives reveals that Shakespeare has a vague idea about Arabs and the Orient at large. Therefore, Shakespeare represents the Orient as the other; his Orient is rather exotic and bizarre, posing as an impending menace to Europe.
{"title":"Shakespeare’s Orientalism Revisited","authors":"Mahmoud Al-shetawi","doi":"10.3167/cs.2020.320403","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/cs.2020.320403","url":null,"abstract":"This article attempts to document and examine the corpus of Arabic and Islamic allusions and references in Shakespeare’s drama and poetry in line with postcolonial discourse and theory. The works of Shakespeare incorporate a large body of Arabic/Islamic matters, which the Bard has gleaned from different sources, such as travel literature, narratives of pilgrims, history annals and common tales of the Crusaders. However, these matters are sporadic in Shakespeare’s works, woven into the fabric of various plays and poems. For example, Shakespeare has thematically used a set of allusions and references to the Arab world such as Arabian trees, the Prophet Mohammed, the Turk, Aleppo, Jerusalem, and many others. Shakespeare has also presented three Oriental characters in his plays: the Prince of Morocco, Shylock and Othello, each with distinctive ethnic and personal traits. A scrutiny of Arabic and Islamic matters in the works of Shakespeare from postcolonial critical perspectives reveals that Shakespeare has a vague idea about Arabs and the Orient at large. Therefore, Shakespeare represents the Orient as the other; his Orient is rather exotic and bizarre, posing as an impending menace to Europe.","PeriodicalId":56154,"journal":{"name":"Critical Survey","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46430797","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article argues that Joe Sacco in Safe Area Goražde, first published in 2000, constantly draws our attention to the resilience of the Goražde people who recover from their horrific experiences of the 1994–95 massacres, as a way of pointing to the continuing trauma of the same people. First, Sacco depicts both individual and social resilience. He then presents the inhabitants of the town as living in perpetual risk, for resilience demands the mobilisation of disaster or its threat as a constant presence. Third, resilience is linked to the collapse of cultural protection where the survivors are transformed into previvors of a future disaster. Sacco suggests that resilience, then, is not a good thing after all because it opens up already embedded vulnerability to greater exposure and an uncertain, but not secure, future.
{"title":"Visualising Resilience","authors":"P. Nayar","doi":"10.3167/cs.2020.320407","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/cs.2020.320407","url":null,"abstract":"This article argues that Joe Sacco in Safe Area Goražde, first published in 2000, constantly draws our attention to the resilience of the Goražde people who recover from their horrific experiences of the 1994–95 massacres, as a way of pointing to the continuing trauma of the same people. First, Sacco depicts both individual and social resilience. He then presents the inhabitants of the town as living in perpetual risk, for resilience demands the mobilisation of disaster or its threat as a constant presence. Third, resilience is linked to the collapse of cultural protection where the survivors are transformed into previvors of a future disaster. Sacco suggests that resilience, then, is not a good thing after all because it opens up already embedded vulnerability to greater exposure and an uncertain, but not secure, future.","PeriodicalId":56154,"journal":{"name":"Critical Survey","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44957686","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In this issue of Critical Survey, the journal continues to publish cutting-edge research on Shakespeare and Renaissance literature, together with innovative work in modern literature and theatre studies.
{"title":"Introduction","authors":"G. Holderness","doi":"10.3167/cs.2020.320401","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/cs.2020.320401","url":null,"abstract":"In this issue of Critical Survey, the journal continues to publish cutting-edge research on Shakespeare and Renaissance literature, together with innovative work in modern literature and theatre studies.","PeriodicalId":56154,"journal":{"name":"Critical Survey","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47147300","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
With reference to aspects of the career of the twentieth-century actor-manager Donald Wolfit and the use of the concept of provincialism in English criticism, this article argues that idealist and universalist values are repeatedly valorised in order to devalue materialist and what might be called ‘provincial’ interpretations of Shakespeare’s plays. I pay attention to conditions of production of early modern drama in the sixteenth century, and to Wolfit’s Second World War performances of Shakespeare, the reception of which is offered as evidence for the persistence of a critical prejudice against what is understood as provincial marginality. The article concludes with a reading of The Merry Wives of Windsor that argues the play supports the provincial values that have so often been dismissed by critics.
{"title":"Provincial Shakespeare","authors":"C. Marlow","doi":"10.3167/cs.2020.320404","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/cs.2020.320404","url":null,"abstract":"With reference to aspects of the career of the twentieth-century actor-manager Donald Wolfit and the use of the concept of provincialism in English criticism, this article argues that idealist and universalist values are repeatedly valorised in order to devalue materialist and what might be called ‘provincial’ interpretations of Shakespeare’s plays. I pay attention to conditions of production of early modern drama in the sixteenth century, and to Wolfit’s Second World War performances of Shakespeare, the reception of which is offered as evidence for the persistence of a critical prejudice against what is understood as provincial marginality. The article concludes with a reading of The Merry Wives of Windsor that argues the play supports the provincial values that have so often been dismissed by critics.","PeriodicalId":56154,"journal":{"name":"Critical Survey","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43028367","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Drawing on feminist theory, this article offers a feminist reading of some Arab Hamlet appropriations to demonstrate whether or not such plays qualify as feminist Shakespeare re-visions. It shows how some female characters in these plays have been, unlike their Shakespearean counterparts, empowered to challenge the hegemonic patriarchal structures of their societies while others remain oppressed and submissive. The discussed Arab Shakespeare renditions constitute only illustrative samples of heroic and oppressed women in the Arab Shakespeare canon which has been known for producing political satires. The featured plays include Ahmad Shawqī’s Masra‘ Kileopatrā (The Fall of Cleopatra), Egypt, 1946; Nabyl Lahlou’s Ophelia Is Not Dead, Morocco, 1968; Mamdūh Al-ʻUdwān’s Hamlet Wakes Up Late, Syria, 1976; Yūsuf Al-Sāyyegh’s Desdemona, Iraq, 1989; Jawād Al-Assadī’s Forget Hamlet, Iraq, 1994; and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Palestine, 2011.
{"title":"Challenging Hegemonic Patriarchy","authors":"S. Mahfouz","doi":"10.3167/cs.2020.320402","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/cs.2020.320402","url":null,"abstract":"Drawing on feminist theory, this article offers a feminist reading of some Arab Hamlet appropriations to demonstrate whether or not such plays qualify as feminist Shakespeare re-visions. It shows how some female characters in these plays have been, unlike their Shakespearean counterparts, empowered to challenge the hegemonic patriarchal structures of their societies while others remain oppressed and submissive. The discussed Arab Shakespeare renditions constitute only illustrative samples of heroic and oppressed women in the Arab Shakespeare canon which has been known for producing political satires. The featured plays include Ahmad Shawqī’s Masra‘ Kileopatrā (The Fall of Cleopatra), Egypt, 1946; Nabyl Lahlou’s Ophelia Is Not Dead, Morocco, 1968; Mamdūh Al-ʻUdwān’s Hamlet Wakes Up Late, Syria, 1976; Yūsuf Al-Sāyyegh’s Desdemona, Iraq, 1989; Jawād Al-Assadī’s Forget Hamlet, Iraq, 1994; and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Palestine, 2011.","PeriodicalId":56154,"journal":{"name":"Critical Survey","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42304844","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Freudian neurosis, despite being a psychological disorder rather than a literary topic, has been used in literature to conceptualise characters’ suffering. Freud contends that the suppression of desires due to hidden and unhidden causes leads to neurosis. Being unable to succeed in life, individuals feel neurotic and tend to displace their frustrations onto other persons or objects. Starting with the Renaissance, this article explores how displacement in Shakespeare’s Hamlet is tacitly approached and how this reaction has become a recurrent case in Willa Cather’s A Lost Lady (1923) and Laila Al Halaby’s Once in a Promised Land (2007). The article analyses the incentives of neurosis in each work, how these reasons lead to the onset of displacement and how literary works share relatively similar implications about displacement despite being about different issues.
{"title":"Hamlet’s Displacement as a Recurrent Case in Cather’s A Lost Lady and Al Halaby’s Once in a Promised Land","authors":"Tareq Zuhair","doi":"10.3167/cs.2020.320405","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/cs.2020.320405","url":null,"abstract":"Freudian neurosis, despite being a psychological disorder rather than a literary topic, has been used in literature to conceptualise characters’ suffering. Freud contends that the suppression of desires due to hidden and unhidden causes leads to neurosis. Being unable to succeed in life, individuals feel neurotic and tend to displace their frustrations onto other persons or objects. Starting with the Renaissance, this article explores how displacement in Shakespeare’s Hamlet is tacitly approached and how this reaction has become a recurrent case in Willa Cather’s A Lost Lady (1923) and Laila Al Halaby’s Once in a Promised Land (2007). The article analyses the incentives of neurosis in each work, how these reasons lead to the onset of displacement and how literary works share relatively similar implications about displacement despite being about different issues.","PeriodicalId":56154,"journal":{"name":"Critical Survey","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46562096","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article attempts for the first time to shed light on the politics of simulation and dissimulation in Isabella Whitney’s ‘Wyll and Testament’. It also argues that the poem both reflects its creator’s awareness of the celebrated English historical and topographical narratives and deviates from them by crucially omitting a seminal part of London’s history, namely its Troynovant tradition. In so doing, as well as by defining a paradoxical urban landscape, Whitney presents a tale not of the (mythic) founding of the English capital with its patriarchal and nation-building connotations, but of its (satiric) bequeathal by benevolent femininity, as such offering its reader a different angle from which to explore and interpret early modern London.
{"title":"[I] ‘did write this Wyll with my own hand’","authors":"Vassiliki Markidou","doi":"10.3167/cs.2020.320406","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/cs.2020.320406","url":null,"abstract":"This article attempts for the first time to shed light on the politics of simulation and dissimulation in Isabella Whitney’s ‘Wyll and Testament’. It also argues that the poem both reflects its creator’s awareness of the celebrated English historical and topographical narratives and deviates from them by crucially omitting a seminal part of London’s history, namely its Troynovant tradition. In so doing, as well as by defining a paradoxical urban landscape, Whitney presents a tale not of the (mythic) founding of the English capital with its patriarchal and nation-building connotations, but of its (satiric) bequeathal by benevolent femininity, as such offering its reader a different angle from which to explore and interpret early modern London.","PeriodicalId":56154,"journal":{"name":"Critical Survey","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47267651","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
John Ford’s play ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore offers a compelling rendering of the state of happiness. Its scandalous plot, which revolves around the incestuous relationship between the two siblings Giovanni and Annabella, confronts the audience with an intricate discussion of early modern notions of happiness. Situated in the ambiguous sphere between a secular and a theological reading of what it means to be happy, Ford’s play stages the conflicts and the calamities that derive from its protagonists’ eager attempt to attain and to live their own version of happiness.
约翰·福特（John Ford）的戏剧《可惜她是妓女》（Tis Pity She’s a Whore）对幸福状态进行了引人入胜的演绎。它的丑闻情节围绕着两个兄弟姐妹乔瓦尼和安娜贝拉之间的乱伦关系展开，观众对早期现代幸福观进行了复杂的讨论。福特的剧本处于世俗和神学对幸福含义的解读之间的模糊地带，讲述了主人公渴望获得并过上自己版本的幸福所带来的冲突和灾难。
{"title":"Happiness Against All Odds","authors":"Christoph Ehland","doi":"10.3167/cs.2020.320309","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/cs.2020.320309","url":null,"abstract":"John Ford’s play ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore offers a compelling rendering of the state of happiness. Its scandalous plot, which revolves around the incestuous relationship between the two siblings Giovanni and Annabella, confronts the audience with an intricate discussion of early modern notions of happiness. Situated in the ambiguous sphere between a secular and a theological reading of what it means to be happy, Ford’s play stages the conflicts and the calamities that derive from its protagonists’ eager attempt to attain and to live their own version of happiness.","PeriodicalId":56154,"journal":{"name":"Critical Survey","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.3167/cs.2020.320309","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49532466","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
‘Happiness’, as we now commonly understand the term, is not something we should expect to meet in Shakespeare’s work. When he employs alternative words – such as ‘felicity, ‘merry’ or ‘blessed’ – he rarely seeks to convey what latter-day readers might assume to be the concept of ‘happiness’ that we accept as an agreeable state of mind. Shakespeare’s ‘happy’ seems to apply to circumstances rather than to a state of mind. His characters often appear to be luckier in their happiness rather than actual achievers of happiness. The idea that the ‘pursuit of happiness’ is an essential part of the definition of the human condition (as in the founding documents of the American Revolution) may well owe far more to John Milton’s use of the words ‘happy’ and ‘happiness’ and the common acceptance of ‘happiness’ as a socially and politically desirable condition.
{"title":"Absent Felicity","authors":"A. Sanders","doi":"10.3167/cs.2020.320305","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/cs.2020.320305","url":null,"abstract":"‘Happiness’, as we now commonly understand the term, is not something we should expect to meet in Shakespeare’s work. When he employs alternative words – such as ‘felicity, ‘merry’ or ‘blessed’ – he rarely seeks to convey what latter-day readers might assume to be the concept of ‘happiness’ that we accept as an agreeable state of mind. Shakespeare’s ‘happy’ seems to apply to circumstances rather than to a state of mind. His characters often appear to be luckier in their happiness rather than actual achievers of happiness. The idea that the ‘pursuit of happiness’ is an essential part of the definition of the human condition (as in the founding documents of the American Revolution) may well owe far more to John Milton’s use of the words ‘happy’ and ‘happiness’ and the common acceptance of ‘happiness’ as a socially and politically desirable condition.","PeriodicalId":56154,"journal":{"name":"Critical Survey","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.3167/cs.2020.320305","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45320337","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Sir Philip Sidney is not commonly associated with a search for happiness or the use he made of concepts of happiness in his works. Yet, as this article seeks to show, he employed a rhetoric of happiness throughout. In particular, Sidney’s Arcadias – the Old Arcadia, which he finished in 1581, and the New Arcadia, the substantial rewriting which remained unfinished – are markedly different in their representations of and their reflections on happiness. While happiness is associated with the Arcadian state as a – potentially fatal – aim in the Old Arcadia from its very beginning, it is subordinated to a sterner and more violent discourse in the New Arcadia, for which after Sidney’s death other writers wrote diverse happy endings. This different treatment of happiness in the Arcadias is also discussed with a view to different manuscripts and print editions as well as to the power play at the Elizabethan court.
{"title":"Happiness in Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia","authors":"J. Frenk","doi":"10.3167/cs.2020.320306","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3167/cs.2020.320306","url":null,"abstract":"Sir Philip Sidney is not commonly associated with a search for happiness or the use he made of concepts of happiness in his works. Yet, as this article seeks to show, he employed a rhetoric of happiness throughout. In particular, Sidney’s Arcadias – the Old Arcadia, which he finished in 1581, and the New Arcadia, the substantial rewriting which remained unfinished – are markedly different in their representations of and their reflections on happiness. While happiness is associated with the Arcadian state as a – potentially fatal – aim in the Old Arcadia from its very beginning, it is subordinated to a sterner and more violent discourse in the New Arcadia, for which after Sidney’s death other writers wrote diverse happy endings. This different treatment of happiness in the Arcadias is also discussed with a view to different manuscripts and print editions as well as to the power play at the Elizabethan court.","PeriodicalId":56154,"journal":{"name":"Critical Survey","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.3167/cs.2020.320306","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47984742","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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