ABSTRACT
In her magisterial The Egyptian Theatre: Cultural Encounters, Volumes I and II (Cairo, 2004–5), Nehād Ṣelaīḥa, the far-famed Arabic drama critic, asks, “what happens to plays when presented in cultural contexts other than their own? — to dramatic texts in translation …?” This is obviously the central question in any approach to translating Shakespeare into any other language, not merely into Arabic; but with Arabic the question acquires an added difficulty, namely, the fact that Arabic lacks the dramatic tradition of most European languages. 2
