B I B L I O T E C A D I S T U D I I N G L E S I 9

Serie "Teatro"

POSTCOLONIAL SHAKESPEARE

STUDI IN ONORE DI VIOLA PAPETTI

a cura di MASOLINO D'AMICO e SIMONA CORSO

ROMA 2009 EDIZIONI DI STOMA E LETTERATURA

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HAMLET TURN'D TURKE: SHAKESPEAREAN POSTCOLONIALITIES

A special kind of irony is inevitably present whenever postcolo-niality - as a desirable and systematic instrument of critique - is dis-cussed in the heart of former empires, the metropolitan centres. There can hardly be a more imperial city than Rome, yet when we talk about Shakespeare we have other empires in mind: the British Empire that was not yet quite there, the American empire that we are still coming to terms with, the empire of English as a global language, the empire of high culture from which theatres in various communi-ties still unsuccessfully strive to dissociate themselves and within which Shakespeare is still securely anchored. Shakespeare scholarship has developed a thorough familiarity with the lines of postcolonial debate and Shakespeare scholars tend to be either too aggressive or too timid when invited to speak about postcolonial Shakespeares, mainly due to the difference of their own personal and professional investments. Recent historical scholarship has emphasised the poten-tial pitfalls of such approaches whereby the existence of the British Empire is unproblematically projected back into the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the age of Shakespeare. Voices from several sides are warning us that the Empire was still not in place and that to read The Tempest at its moment of theatrical origin as a com-ment on England's imperial encounter with the New World is to be anachronistic. But we know only too well that Shakespeare himself is no stranger to anachronisms of all sorts, that his Romans wear hats

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and his Trojans read Aristotle, and we similarly know that postcolo-nial investigations of Shakespeare are often concerned not with the moments of origin but the different - often dramatic and melancholy - moments of reception. It must be clear, in other words, to every sympathetic observer that reading Shakespeare through the lens of colonial experience - literal or metaphoric - always originates in the present, even when we are attempting to reconstruct the past in its own terms. The experience of violence and pain always survives his-tory and finds its traumatic re-enactment in the present moment. It is harder to accept - though equally true - that any attempt to under-stand the past, however sophisticated, must originate in the present too and that such limitations are the familiar though frequently unac-knowledged trouble of the literary and historical student alike. We must wonder whether England in the late sixteenth century was mar-ginal in the sense in which we are marginal today. Culturally speak-ing, certainly so. For the purposes of postcolonial studies, therefore, Shakespeare - as we know it - emerged much later. We are still try-ing to understand how exactly and when, while half-heartedly con-ceding that its (or his) pervasive presence is yet another token of our current predicament. In order to grasp the extent of the predicament, we insist on the necessity to understand Shakespeare as inherited, constructed and deployed today. As professional students of Shakespeare, we are - I think it is safe to say - at a loss as to what exactly is happening to us. As foreign Shakespeare scholars we have never really managed to argue our case, if there is a common one, in the metropolitan spheres of 'our' discipline. We inhabit the margins and we console ourselves with the thought that at times this gives us a sort of paradoxical empowerment and rare singularity of insight. Rare indeed.

It is partly owing to this that whenever we speak about postcolo-nial Shakespeare - and let us bracket the problem of the enormous diversity behind the label for the moment - we tend to drop into the first person and legitimate our mediated discourse by resort to the immediacy of experience. I wonder whether I should do the same. I wonder whether I should tell you about my own complicated, unre-solved, fractured webs of identity: the story of the displaced Bosnian

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Croat who lost faith in metaphysics of one sort only to continue look-ing for another sort of metaphysics elsewhere. What should knaves like us do, crawling between heaven and earth? I find myself locked in my local academic context in which postcolonial theory is still among the latest academic fads. It is used irresponsibly, apparently with the design to inspire the uninitiated with awe and to lump together things that often have little in common. It is embraced and resented at one and the same time. "We cannot let this train leave with-out us, can we, because we never know whether there is another one coming and whether we are not doomed to spend the rest of our mis-erable academic careers waiting for a mere fiction. The age of theo-ries over, what are we to fall back upon? For a foreign Shakespeare scholar this must be a premature question, to be sure. In many intel-lectual cultures, European and non-European alike, questions that postcolonial theory raises have not even begun to be properly asked, let alone systematically investigated. The culture I come from is no different: postcolonial Shakespeares are there, but they are not there. A natural perspective, one might say, that is and is not. It is about this natural perspective that I wish now to say something more specific.

In February 2006 I went to see a performance of Hamlet given by a Bosnian theatre company (Space Productions) during their visit to Zagreb and advertised as a rather singular event since this Hamlet was to be an Ottoman prince and the somewhat uncertain period markers of Shakespeare's play were thus about to be boldly translat-ed into the equally vague determinants of Ottoman history^ Seeing a

' The production premiered in Tuzla (Bosnia) in 2005; I saw it on 15 February 2006 in the Zagreb Youth Theatre (ZKM: Zagrebacko kazaliste mladih), where I sat in the second row of the stalls. It was directed by Haris Pasovic, an established the-atrical presence even in former Yugoslavia, and produced by Space Productions Sarajevo in co-production with the Bosnian Cultural Centre in Tuzla, the British Council and the Zagreb Youth Theatre. The translation used was the Serbian one (Simo Pandurevic and Zivojin Simic), adapted by Senada Kreso and the director him-self. Hamlet was played by Amar Selimovic, Claudius by Frano Maskovic, Gertrude by Damjana Cerne, Hamlet's Ghost by Miodrag Krivokapic (who also played the Player King and one of the clowns/gravediggers), Polonius by Slaven Knezovic, Ophelia by Zana Marjanovic, Horatio by Damir Markovina, Fortinbras by Sabina

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performance of Hamlet in Zagreb can never be entirely free of the liv-ing history of another Hamlet, that in 'Mrdusa Donja', or 'a village in Central Dalmatia' as the English translation has it, which closely and critically observed Croatian culture - especially political culture - as it was painfully going through its significant transformations and adjustments in the course of the last four decades^. Hamlet has been and remains a text which in certain regions of Europe in particular seems regularly to serve varied and sometimes diametrically opposed political agendas, but most often those that are of the present moment and that theatre people believe are of burning relevance to the communities in which theatrical culture somewhat precariously and always uneasily subsists. Whether they be straightforward con-ventional performances, translations, re-inscriptions, adaptations, transformations, tradaptations, recruitments, transpositions or whether they go under any other ingenious or learned name that Shakespearean appropriation studies may choose to give them, these interventions into the local context have typically themselves re-enacted the central dramatic preoccupations of the play they thought they were staging. Like the central character of the Prince, local, 'for-eign' Hamlets keep finding it difficult to reconcile their own specific and peculiar situations with the larger themes and universal concerns

Bambur (also the Player Queen and one of the clowns) and the remaining characters by Armin Catic and Aldin Omerovic. It is obvious that the actors come from differ-ent ex-Yugoslav republics and, as the programme points out, the team also included people from the United Kingdom, Turkey, France and Spain. The performance last-ed for more than four full hours, interval excluded. Judging from the script - kindly put at my disposal by Haris Pasovic - the first part, ending with the second scene of the third act, lasted for about 130 minutes, the second about 120.

^ Ivo Bresan's play - entitled Predstava Hamleta u selu Mrdusa Donja and still very popular in what goes under the name of Eastern Europe - was written in 1965 but was not performed until 1971, when the Zagreb ITD Theatre staged what they called «A Ring Around Shakespeare» that included Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead as well as Giinter Grass's The Plebeians Rehearse the Revolution. For an English translation (a truly impossible task) see L Bresan, The Performance of Hamlet in Central Dalmatia, translated by W. E. Yuill (Zagreb, Most/The Bridge, 1992). In the 1990s the play was further adapted in order to speak more explicitly to the new political situation.

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that never stop intruding upon them. The pettiness of the Communist regime in a God-forsaken Dalmatian village had in the production I was about to see been replaced by the wanton grandeur of the Ottoman court and the perennial fascinations of the Orient. The for-mer was a new play that used Shakespeare's Hamlet to a spectacular-ly comic yet deeply serious effect, the latter - it claimed - a faithful reproduction of the Shakespearean original. In a rather grim and uncharitable manner, I wish to wonder with the eminent student of foreign Shakespeare «what "Shakespeare", exacdy, has been trans-ferred and appropriated» and «for what reasons»^

In its own local, Bosnian context the Ottoman Hamlet - let me refer to it in this way - may be seen as activating a different tradition from the one I have been outlining, whether Haris Pasovic, its direc-tor and spiritus movens, was conscious of it or not. Shakespeare's Hamlet was very recently used by a novelist who conveniently bridges the gap between Croatian and Bosnian cultures, being himself a Bosnian Muslim educated in Croatia and starting his writing career there. His name is Irfan Horozovic and the novel I have in mind is William Shakespeare u Dar es Salaamu {William Shakespeare in Dar es Salaam^, which very ingeniously plays with Shakespeare's Hamlet in order to say something powerful about postwar trauma, about mem-ory and about professional ethics'*. Or so at least I argued in a paper' that in its final footnote, the place where all pretence must be aban-

' D. Kennedy, Afterword: Shakespearean Orientalism, in Foreign Shakespeare: Contemporary Performance, edited by D. Kennedy (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 290-303, quotation from p. 291. Although quoting Kennedy here in what looks like a positive context, I am fully aware of the problems his vision of 'foreign Shakespeare' entails. In a more general way I try to address these difficulties - hardly resolvable on any theoretical level - in my own short and impa-tient reflection on foreign Shakespeare and foreign Shakespeare scholars: The Native Hue of Revolution: Foreign Shakespeare and Foreign Shakespeare Scholars, «Studia Romanica et Anglica Zagrabiensia» 49 (2004), pp. 157-177.

"^ I. Horozovic, William Shakespeare u Dar es Salaamu (Zagreb, Mozaik knjiga, 2002).

' "Must I remember?": Hamlet, Memory and Shakespearean Trauma, in Shakespeare in Europe: History and Memory, edited by M. Gibinska and Agnieszka Romanowska, Krakow, Jagiellonian University Press, 2008, pp. 187-204.

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doned and the embarrassing absence of truth unwillingly revealed, casts a melancholy look at the kind of theatrical - and never simply theatrical - projects that I thought the Ottoman Hamlet belonged to (at that time still unseen by me). As I was finally abandoning that paper in late September 2005 - thoroughly dissatisfied with its per-sistent lack of closure - I came across an online article about the 'Muslim Hamlet' performed in Sarajevo earlier that month. The arti-cle's title was Hamlet Made a Muslim Prince in Post 9/11 Adaptation and it spoke of a Bosnian director attempting to articulate the ques-tion «to be or not to be» from the perspective of the Muslims living in the post 9/11 world. At the end of the article one could find words typical of the theatrical and cultural projects in Bosnia these days, though I am not sure how much they tell us about Shakespeare or how much they fail to tell us about ourselves and about the problems that with or without Shakespeare keep dividing us:

And so a story in a Christian setting, in which the hero questions the injus-tices of the world and his own personal tragedy, can just as well apply to Muslims. «Hamlet is a universal story that concerns us all», Pasovic [the director] said. «These issues do not concern only Muslims, but all people equally, showing that we all share the same problems regardless of religion, nation and culture»''

This came as a shock - to put it mildly - to someone concerned with detailing the specificities of Shakespearean presence in a very sensitive cultural and political context. I was trying to imagine how Shakespearean scholarship produced in Bosnia by one of its leading politicians and architects of the recent war (Nikola Koljevic) interact-ed with the recent revisions of Shakespearean meanings and their applicability or relevance in a disjointed or even completely shattered world. So I went on and concluded the footnote by reiterating the simple ideas informing the paper and my thinking throughout: that it

'" The article is written by Daria Sito-Sucic and was last accessed by me on 20 February 2006 at http://www.entertainment-news.org/breaking/34820/hamlet-made-a-muslim-prince-in-post-911-adaptation.html. It is available on other sites as well.

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is important though not enough simply to say that Hamlet is about the mirrors of memory or that memory organizes and structures it, that the play - in other words - very much works according to the logic of things re/membered^ The question must be, I continued with bold rashness, what we are to do and how we are to deal with the specificity of these memories as they haunt the troubled sites of our personal and professional traumas (mine not excluded). And then, jump upon that bloody question, I did my best to clarify what I wish - and I emphasise this 'wishful' aspect - to mean by ethics of memo-ry: a space or a state in which memory gives rise to ethical dilemmas and where the case is simultaneously altered. Ethics, it seems, cannot hope to escape memory; indeed, its major responsibility must be to face it, troubling and unwelcome as that may be. Perhaps Hamlet, I generalised again, for us - or maybe just for me - must remain a study in the ethics of remembrance if it is going to continue to matter.

One might rightly begin to wonder how these lofty and very gen-eral thoughts relate to a theatrical experiment that is just one of many unless their author thinks that there is sense in responsibly trying to find one's way out of the double bind of the general and the particu-lar, of value dwelling in particular will or holding a general sway all its own. The predicament - can we attain knowledge that, while tak-ing account of the local, transcends the particularities and boundaries of local vision and ultimately enables us to appreciate the issues that we agree are common to all of us and continue to be vitally important no matter who or where we happen to be? - is in many ways a typi-cal one and the Ottoman Hamlet seems to be suffering from it much more severely than I - a residual humanist of sorts - do. In order to say that the story of Hamlet is universal, the director undertakes to set it at the Ottoman court so that it can speak to the Muslims (or the

'' See for example J. Kerrigan's Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1996), esp. p. 185; T. Hawkes, Telmah, in That Shakespeherian Rag: Essays on a Critical Process (London and New York, Methuen, 1986), pp. 92-119; M. NeiLl, Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy (Oxford and New York, Clarendon Press, 1997); S. Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2001).

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Ottomans, I am not sure which). Coming from a country which used to be part of that amazing empire, I did my best to look at the idea sympathetically and congenially. What are the contexts this produc-tion wants to activate? What notions of history am I supposed to entertain in order to gain the most from this theatrical experience? What understanding of my current political, intellectual and cultural situation - to leave the personal one, no doubt deeply influenced by all of these, out of the discussion for a moment - am I to take away with me and reflect upon at that rare and careless time called leisure? Am I taking all this too seriously or, like Hamlet, «thinking too pre-cisely on th'event» (IV, 4, 41)?* For if the island somewhere in the Mediterranean could be all icy and cold, as in the recent RSC produc-tion of The Tempesf, there seems to be no reason why the freezing winds of Denmark should not be transformed into the breezes of Bosphorus and the Golden Horn. A closer look at the programme, I thought, might help me resolve some of these lingering dilemmas.

As a matter of fact, two programmes were printed for the produc-tion in question: one in Bosnian - large and wide-ranging, and the other in English - smaller in size and mostly focused on the reception with which the production met abroad. I shall briefly concentrate on the programme written in Bosnian and comprising two separate sec-tions. The first one is by the director, Haris Pasovic, and is entitled Element Hamlet, while the second - much larger - is an anonymous overview of a couple of episodes from the rich archives of the Ottoman period entitled Osmanska imperija [The Ottoman Empire], detailing its rapid growth and slow decline and paying particular attention to the sites of imperial administration and royal authority. Apart from some poems - notably, Boris Pasternak's Hamlet - the programme also includes an interview with the director and some

* «I do not know», says Hamlet (IV, 4, 43). Probably, I would say, but then there would be no paper to write. Specific references to the play are to the best modern edition: the conflated text prepared by Harold Jenkins for the Arden Shakespeare (London and New York, Methuen, 1982).

' W. Shakespeare, The Tempest, directed by Rupert Goold. The production is part of the Royal Shakespeare Company's The Complete Works Season, 2006-2007. I saw it at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon on 12 September 2006.

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photos of the production. It makes sense, it seems to me, to pay more attention to what the director has to say about his own work than is usually done as we are undoubtedly dealing with a piece of 'director's Shakespeare', where the roles of the actors are largely subservient to the proclaimed vision of the director as auteur.

The director's piece in the programme begins somewhat pre-dictably with a reference to Jan Kott and the questions he raises in connection with Shakespeare's Hamlet, especially in his book Szkice 0 Szekspirze, made famous - but also misleading - under its English title, Shakespeare Our Contemporary (1964). The central question for the company, as envisaged by its director, was no doubt a mind-bog-gling one: «Which Hamlet is the most Shakespearean and the most contemporary at one and the same time?»^°. What Pasovic claims they did was first of all strip the play of «the stereotypes and prejudices» heaped upon it in the course of the last four hundred years (a startling statement, no doubt, but certainly not unique in the long tradition of staging Shakespeare's Hamlet) in order to experience anew the «enthusiastic theatrical undertaking full of action and spirit», an enormous challenge that puts to the test - most importantly - the 'human responsibility' and the 'artistic dignity' of those involved in the project. The opening question - the contemporaneity or moder-nity of Hamlet — soon receives a rather general answer: «We have found the contemporaneity of Hamlet in the similarity between Hamlet (as well as other characters) and the human being of the pres-ent, his isic] dilemmas and ambivalences». The characters of the play, Pasovic goes on, inhabit a world that we «feel as fundamentally our own», they «respond to our deepest needs, ambitions and fears». Hamlet is employed in the pragmatic task of understanding the pres-

'" The reference must be to the following statement Kott makes early in his essay on Hamlet [Hamlet of the Mid-Century, in Shakespeare Our Contemporary, translat-ed by Bolesiaw Taborski [London: Methuen and Co, 1964], pp. 48-61, quotation from p. 49): «An ideal Hamlet would be one most true to Shakespeare, and most modern at the same time. Is this possible? I do not know. But we can only appraise any Shakespearian production by asking how much there is of Shakespeare in it, and how much of us». The programme is not paginated so I am unable to provide accu-rate reference while discussing it.

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ent moment (the last two decades, in fact), special and «essentially different from all we have so far known of human history» (it is not explained how or why). Shakespeare's verbal art is then likened to the artistic achievements of the Ottoman era: their poetry, calligraphy and music. What had led the director to set Shakespeare's Hamlet at the Ottoman court was the «dramatic resemblance* between the plot of Hamlet and the intrigues at the heart of the Ottoman Empire:

I had begun with the assumption that Hamlet belongs to humanity, to every culture and every civilisation. The story of Hamlet happened or could have happened at the Elizabethan, Danish, Ottoman, Russian, Chinese or Japanese courts. I have chosen the Ottoman court. What happens when Hamlet is placed in a Muslim context? What does such a transposition tell us about the world we are living in?

The question is certainly an interesting one, yet the answer the production provides is neither clear nor terribly exciting. We might in fact be justified in wondering whether we are not dealing here with what Kott called «a forced topicality* {Hamlet of the Mid-Century, p. 49), a strained attempt to set Shakespeare's play not in «a cellar of young existentialists* but in that of young orientalists. What vision of the Orient are we expected to entertain or accept and how precisely does it relate to our own lives (given that 'we' know who 'we' are) and to our dilemmas and ambivalences?

The programme unambiguously directs the audience to look at certain episodes from the Ottoman history as relevant for a better understanding of this particular theatrical vision: they are the required analogy, the necessary link on which the production builds. In the course of a brief historical overview of feuds and fights that characterise the long stretch of Turkish history two episodes are sin-gled out for special mention". This is done because both of them

" In what follows I shall only concentrate on the first of these, i.e. the power of royal women at the Ottoman court. The second episode selected for discussion in the programme is the story of the long struggle between the two sons of Mehmed II, Bayezid and Cem, at the end of the fifteenth century.

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seem in their different ways to resonate with Hamlet in powerful and intriguing ways. In order to illustrate the power and importance of the sultan's wife, the programme speaks at length about the extraor-dinary career of Suleyman the Magnificent's favourite wife Roxelana - «sometime his faire concubine, but then his imperious wife», writes Richard KnoUes'̂ - and the ways in which she managed to influence the judgement of the sultan and make sure that her own son - rather than the eldest born (Mustafa), from another of the sultan's wives (Rose of Spring) - succeeds to the throne". Though successful in her schemes, it is questionable whether the rule of her son Selim («the debauched Selim», Kinross calls him, p. 241) was really beneficial to the future of one of the greatest empires the world has seen.

The real problem is, however, that Roxelana is much more of an exception than the rule, a qualification that would have been wel-come but was likely to create additional problems for the kind of cor-respondence the production was attempting to trace. Out of the

'̂ R, Knolles, The Generall Historie of the Turkes (London 1603), p. 757. ' ' A vivid and popular account of the rivalry between Roxelana and Rose of

Spring - including the stand-up fist-fight between them - can for instance be found in N. Barber's The Lords of the Golden Horn: From Suleiman the Magnificent to Kamal Ataturk (London and Basingstoke, MacmUlan, 1973), pp. 36-44. The dust jacket has a different title: Lords of the Golden Horn: The Sultans, Their Harems and the Fall of the Ottoman Empire. Harem seems the perfect word to stir the (reading) desires of the Westerner. It also - typically - associates erotic/sexual excess with political failure. Lord Kinross [The Ottoman Centuries: The Rise and Fall of the Turkish Empire [London, Jonathan Cape, 1977], p. 236) shows less levity but makes essentially the same point: «Through the two intervening decades Suleiman had fall-en more than ever under the spell of his Slav favourite, who had become generally known to Europeans as La Rossa, or Roxelana. Originally a captive from Galicia, the daughter of a Ukrainian priest, she was named by the Turks Khurren, or 'the Laughing One', from her joyous smile and her merry disposition, and she had replaced in the Sultan's affections his previous favourite, Giilbehar, or «the Rose of Spring. [...] Quick in her understanding and subtle in her ways, Roxelana cleverly learned to read Suleiman's thoughts and to guide them in the directions that suited her ambition for power». For a sustained study of the power women wielded in the context of the Ottoman imperial harem, see L. P. Peirce, The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire (New York and Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1993).

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rather impressive number of concubines residing in the harem the sultan chose only several for his sexual use, which were then graced with the title hdseki^'*. Even though Ottoman sultans did not as a rule contract canonically legal marriages, they did have their favourite 'wives' - usually four in number and mothers to the sultan's children. It can easily be guessed therefore that the sultan's wives - even once they attain to the title of kadin - were not particularly powerful indi-viduals, in political sense at least. The only woman who did wield sig-nificant power and very often influenced the sultan's decisions - espe-cially since the late sixteenth century - was the sole mistress of the harem, the sultan's mother or vdlide sultan (Queen Mother). Thinking about the Ottoman Hamlet in this context - in the context of the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, the home of Ottoman sultans for nearly four centuries and the place where the production is explicitly set - we must start wondering how much sense the drama of Hamlet is actually making when we start observing it in specific historical and political terms. Gertrude is - quite inaccurately, it seems - in this pro-duction called Valide sultan' and thus assigned power that in actual-ity she could not possibly have. As mother of the eldest born - the only mother of the only son, another problem that has little in com-mon with the kind of Ottoman history we are invited to explore -Gertrude would be expected to do her best and make sure her son succeeds as the next sultan as soon as possible. The sultan's brother - Claudius, in this case - would be of no significance and marrying him is as far from the Ottoman idea of royal succession as we could possibly get''. In other words, the Ottoman court - taken as a con-

''' A good account of the harem and the manner in which the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul operated is found in H. Inalcik's The Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age 1300-1600, translated by Norman Itzkowitz and Colin Imber (London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973), especially chapter XI, The Palace, pp. 76-88. My debt to Inalcik throughout this section is more than obvious.

" The pursuit of accurate analogies could take us further, depending which char-acter we decide to focus on. Polonius - described as Grand Vizier in the production - would only make sense as the chief white eunuch, but then he would have to be childless. Access to the private home of the sultan would be much more restricted than it appears from the production, while Claudius's lines «Therefore our sometime

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Crete historical location rather than a vague and convenient analogy -can hardly be the right place to casually underline the importance that recent Hamlet criticism, especially that of the historicist bent, has assigned to Gertrude with regard to the vexed and pending issue of succession in (still) Elizabethan England '̂̂ . Similarly, perceiving Hamlet as a family drama is here rendered more difficult by transpos-ing it into a very different system of family relations: a modern-dress Hamlet - even a Hamlet such as Almereyda's (2000), where Denmark turns into Denmark corporation - usually preserves the basic family structures and power relations that are essential for Hamlet to func-tion as effective or indeed meaningful drama.

The resonances, it is true, become stronger when we begin think-ing about the situation at the Topkapi Palace at the end of the six-teenth century, the reign of Mehmed III (1595-1603). It was him -Inalcik notes (p. 60) - who terminated the custom of sending young princes to be educated in the art of government and, instead, pre-ferred to have them pent in the Palace harem, a space that was a ver-itable prison and soon began to be known under the term kafes, meaning 'a cage'. These caged princes can indeed more readily remind us of Hamlet saying to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern that «Denmark's a prison» (II, 2, 243), which in the production under dis-cussion becomes «Turkey is a prison». Hamlet's madness - true or feigned - can be seen as resembling the unstable mental condition of the unfortunate sons of the sultan, never quite sure if they were to be executed and when. When Suleyman II was taken to be enthroned, he was in tears and his words have been recorded for us (cf. Inalcik, p. 60):

sister, now our queen, / Th'imperial jointress to this warlike state» (I, 2, 8-9) are very difficult to understand, coming as they do from a sultan. This is further complicated by the adapted translation, where the lines read something like: «Therefore our sometime sister, now our sultana, / Th'inheritor of our warlike state» («Stoga nasu negdasnju snahu, a sadasnju Sultaniju, / Nasljednicu nase ratnicke dr2ave»). Fortinbras is a Moghul princess rather than a Norwegian prince, but Hamlet still wants to go back to Wittenberg and Laertes returns to France. And so on.

"̂ See for example S. M, Kurland, Hamlet and the Scottish Succession?, «Studies in English Literature*, 34/2 (1994), pp. 279-300,

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If my death has been commanded, say so. Let me perform my prayers, then carry out your order. Since my childhood, I have suffered forty years of imprisonment. It is better to die at once than to die a little every day. What terror we endure for a single breath.

The fleeting resemblances between the English play and its Turkish mirror - gleaned from diverse centuries of Ottoman history - end, however, rather quickly. So when one section of the pro-gramme - rather bizarrely - itself ends with a figure of Horatio stand-ing in the Topkapi Palace and faithfully rendering the story of «car-nal, bloody, and unnatural acts» (V, 2, 386), it is hard not to wonder what harsh world we are in, what kind of pain the preparation should involve and, finally, what is the story that Horatio - in this produc-tion, apparently, Hamlet's lover as well as friend - is expected to «truly deliver» (V, 2, 391). These historical figures - we are again told - «were just people, about whose essence Hamlet speaks, as it does about ours». There is no doubt that some Gertrude - sultana or no sultana - would at this point put on her puzzled look and duly mar-vel at the director: if they are, why seem they so particular with thee?

The problem is not the 'seeming' similarity; it is, doubtless, the particularity - as Hamlet well knows (or should know). The produc-tion ought to have been made much more specific, particular and focused. Presented to the audience in this shape, it is a broad, sugges-tive, vague yet basically simple and crude orientalist fantasy which rather naively believes that all-embracing universality is the way out of the problem, and obviously there is a problem, and a huge and complex one at that. Some of the reviewers seem to have felt the same, meaning that to them too the Ottoman character of the play was everywhere - except in the play". Thus Grgicevic eventually finds

'̂ I am taking into account - for practical reasons - only the reviews published in Croatia. They are as follows and some will be referred to in the main text by their authors' surnames: M. Grgicevic, Na sultanovu dvoru [At the Court of the Sultan], «Vijenac», 2 March 2006, p. 19; Miroslav Zee, Shakespeareova tragedija kao susret civ-ilizacija [Shakespeare's Tragedy as a Meeting of Civilisations], «Novi list», 16 February 2006, p. 19; T. Cadez, Hamlet je zapravo Turcin [Hamlet is Actually a Turk],

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that the Ottoman court and Shakespeare's play did not really work together, mainly because the former - in its oriental splendour and «intensive sensuality», complete with «Turkey cushions boss'd with pearl*'** - seemed to dominate the performance and thus more or less choke the less readily visible powers of the latter, while Ciglar notes that «Pasovic intensified all of the scenes in which the hedonistic Westerner may feel good, but for the Oriental pragmatist absorbed in his own self they appear as mere foolishness* (a statement not entire-ly unproblematic in itself). None of the reviewers fails to note exces-sive sensuality and outright lustfulness permeating the performance -from the almost animalistic desires of Claudius and Gertrude to the homoerotic tension between Horatio and Hamlet, together with their joint erotic involvement with Ophelia - so much so that we would not be entirely off the mark to claim that the Topkapi Palace as figured here is not - in its basic flavour at least - too far removed from the setting of that sprawling nineteenth-century narrative of orientalist pornography. The Lustful Turk^''.

There is little but fantasy in the Ottoman quality of this theatrical Hamlet - or any other Ottoman Hamlet, I would suggest, that aspires to be true both to 'Shakespeare' and to the 'Orient' - and rather than disproving this impression, the sensible and true avouch of one's eyes seems on the contrary to confirm it and «not let belief take hold» (I, 1, 27). Someone might object that the audience is not expected to engage in the process of historical reconstruction and assessment of parallels, but the objector must be able to explain what the audience

«Jutarnji list», 16 February 2006, p. 23; Z. Ciglar, Ostavi se politike, sine Hamlete! [Give up Politics, Hamlet my Son!], «Vecernji list», 17 February 2006, p. 26; K. Kolega, Nesto je trulo u drzavi osmanskoj [Something is Rotten in the Ottoman State], «Slobodna Dalmacija», 16 February 2006, pp. 74-75.

'* See The Taming of the Shrew 2.1.346, edited by B. Morris (London and New York, Methuen, 1981).

' ' The novel is mentioned by E. W. Said (Orientalism [London, Penguin Books, 2003], p. 8) and used almost as a generic term (in quotation marks, not italics). As Said notes, the novel receives extended treatment in S. Marcus's The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth Century England (London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966), Chapter 5, particularly pp. 197-216.

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is expected to engage with in order to appreciate the spectacle it is offered, unless it be some fairly superficial visions of the Orient and the Turk. There is «no violent modernisation» here, the director claims in the interview printed in the programme, believing further that «the production has two parallel, equally important layers: one which is specific and relates to the Muslim world, and one which is universal and applies to all people». And so he dresses his Hamlet in a shirt with Arabic letters on it saying «to be or not to be», the most contemporary of questions for the Muslim context.

Jan Kott, no longer fashionable even among the East Europeans, is quite right to insist that «plays have to be seen within some definite context, some specific time, some specific place»2'' in order to work. In their different ways and different times, local texts and thorough rewritings seem to be raising questions which this production - in spite of its noble ambitions - much less successfully gestures towards, mainly because it opts for a timeless Ottoman empire that lends itself to easy stereotyping. Local creations and local transformations seem to me therefore - if not generally, then certainly here - to function as much more powerful ways of responding to the persistent anxieties of our time and to the peculiarities of our perplexing contexts. Productions which believe that staying true to Shakespeare - to a cer-tain, and highly problematic, idea of Shakespeare, of course - will lend them authority and universal insight are as mistaken as those bemused knaves - God and Allah bless their infected wits - who still go to the theatre in order to change themselves and - somewhat more amusingly - the world.

°̂ Is Shakespeare Still Our Contemporary?, edited by J. Elsom (London and New-York, Routledge, 1989), p. 15.