Hussein Alhawamdeh

University of Jordan | UJ · Department of English Language and Literature

This article analyzes Edward Young's nuanced employment of Islam and appropriation of the Qur'an, first translated into English as The Alcoran of Mahomet in 1649, to attack allegorically the Tories' aspirations to support James Francis Edward Stuart (1701–1766), who was nicknamed “the Old Pretender” by the Whigs and James III by the Tories, to rest...

Charles Saunders’s Tamerlane the Great (1681) appropriates Islam and the Qur’an, first translated into English as The Alcoran of Mahomet in 1649, to attack the influence of the Earl of Shaftesbury (1621–1683) on the Duke of Monmouth, the eldest Protestant son of Charles II. Saunders’s play dramatises two models of royal sons from the Tories’ perspe...

This article examines the transformation of the trope of the renegade character in late seventeenth-and early nineteenth-century English drama, as represented by John Dryden’s Don Sebastian (1689) and its adaptation by Frederick Reynolds as The Renegade (1812). Reynolds adopts the trope of Restoration ‘cultural renegade’, or what I call ‘Restoratio...

This essay examines the conceptualization of pacificism in William Shakespeare’s oeuvre through Mahmoud Darwish’s lens. The Arab Palestinian Bard shares Shakespeare condemnation of war and glorification of humanistic values of peace and toleration. In many of his poems, Darwish shows admiration and identification with Shakespeare as a humanist poet...

Nicholas Rowe's Tamerlane (1701) dramatizes the nuanced and complex relations of England during the Glorious Revolution with the Turkish Empire, recalling William III's efforts in mediating the Treaty of Karlowitz in 1699 as a permanent peace between the Turks and the Holy League in order to end Louis XIV's imperial gains from the Turkish wars. Axa...

Parts One and Two of the Arab Jordanian series Rās Ghlaiṣ (‘The Head of Ghlaiṣ’) (2006/2008), written by Jordanian screenwriter Muṣṭafā Ṣāliḥ and directed by Aḥmad D‘aibis and Sha‘lān al-Dabbās, share three ‘common denominators’, in Haun Saussy’s terminology, with Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great, Parts One and Two (1587): 1) the shepher...

This article analyses the filtering of Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611) in the Restoration drama repertoire, showing the Restoration revision of the Shakespearean stereotypical delineation of the ‘half-moor’ Caliban in the light of Restoration England’s complex relations of admiration and trepidation with regard to the Muslim Moors and Turks. Dryde...

This study investigates the stylistic features that mark the creation of powerlessness, and ultimately “otherness,” in fiction. To this end, this study focuses on two fictional characters: Jelka Sepic in John Steinbeck’s “The Murder” and the old man in Gabriel García Márquez’s “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings.” Most of the clauses associated wit...

This paper analyzes the significance of appropriating three plays by William Shakespeare—Macbeth (1606), Romeo and Juliet (1597), and Othello (1604)—in Samar Attar’s Lina: A Portrait of a Damascene Girl. The Syrian novelist, Attar, finds in Shakespeare powerful sites for the expression of exile, rejection of sentimental love, and resistance of patr...

This article analyses the Shakespearean appropriation in Fadia Faqir’s Willow Trees Don’t Weep (2014) to show how Faqir’s novel establishes a new Arab Jordanian feminist trope of the willow tree, metaphorically embodied in the female character of Najwa, who does not surrender to the atrocities of the masculine discourse. Faqir’s novel, appropriatin...

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....

This paper comparatively explores the different experience of the Muslim Orient - namely, Othello in Shakespeare's Othello (1604) and Mustafa Saeed and the narrator in Salih's Season of Migration to the North (1966) - in the West. It aims at relocating the transformation of the discourse of Orientalism from Renaissance, as represented by Shakespear...