Hamlet as an Arab Intellectual: A Marxist Reading of Mamduh Adwan’s Play Hamlet Wakes Up Late

Abstract

The paper aims at reading Mamduh Adwan’s play Hamlet Wakes up Late (1978) from a Marxist perspective to broadly examine how life under a Capitalist system along with its foreign investments and trading services can easily destroy the political, social as well as the cultural surroundings of a certain nation. Throughout his play, Adwan brilliantly adapts Shakespeare and offers a Marxist point of view to comment on how the West continues to dominate the East with its economic power. Importantly, in employing Shakespeare’s portrayal of Hamlet as a tragic hero, Adwan uses him as a dramatic archetype to comment on one of the Shakespearean’s famous political quotes “something is rotten in the state of Denmark”. Seen from this perspective, the paper will read Adwan’s play from a Marxist viewpoint to demonstrate how he has in fact used Hamlet’s lack of intellectualism to criticize the Syrian policy of “The Six Day War” defeat to Israel.