Shaking spears

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Yehya El-Fakharani as King Lear

LAST month at the Faculty of Al-Alsson, Aim Shams University, the English Department, headed by professor Karma Sami, put the language's best-known bard on trial, with the help of Cairo University's Women's College. Held on 23 April, set aside as Writers Day by UNESCO to celebrate Shakespeare's birth (it also happens to be the day of his death), Sami told Al-Ahram Weekly the event marked "the first time the Bard was officially and academically celebrated in Egypt"; she went on to delineate not only Shakespeare's weight in the world but his impact on Egyptian culture, with Hamlet, A Midsummer Night's Dream and Kind Lear in particular entering the collective imagination and influencing dramatists and artists across generations.

The seminar probed a range of topics from concepts of imprisonment in the Hamlet of Soyinka as well as the original (Laila Galal Rizq) to the semiotics of the pastoral in As You Like It (Kholoud Ezzat), and, with both scholars focusing on Sonnet 116, from Shakespeare's personal and public identity (Sylvia Sobhy) to incarnations of "manner and matter" in his work (Mohamed Nassar). Noha Faisal sought links between Hamlet and the protagonist of Naguib Mahfouz's The Search, while Irene Thabet discussed the Bard's connection with Egypt. For her part Sami delved into Jan Kott's Shakespeare, Our Contemporary, which inspired Peter Brook among many others, reintroducing Shakespeare as a voice for our times. As if to demonstrate the idea, Thabet argued that Shakespeare has always been performed successfully in Egypt, citing the phenomenal success of the National Theatre's recent production of King Lear, starring Yehya El-Fakharani. At the local level Shakespeare, by contrast, is hardly known as a poet. It was left to Hania Hodeib to discuss translating Shakespeare, listing obstacles like wordplay and cultural allusion, as well as proverbial undertones, in a study comparing Arabic versions of The Tempest. Sami hopes to make Writer's Day -- or rather, Shakespeare's Day, an annual event, expressing the desire for more involvement from both the cultural establishment and the British Council.