ABSTRACT
Until less than a century ago there had been no Arabic plays, that is, plays written originally in Arabic. It is now commonly accepted that when Aḥmed Shawqī, the great poet of the early twentieth century wrote his verse plays in the interwar period (1924-32), he was giving sanction to the dramatic form as a literary genre: people began to take it seriously, to read and watch it not as a foreign novelty but an indigenous product. A string of poetdramatists followed: ‘Azīz Abāzah, who aped Shawqī in adapting rhymed verse to the stage; ‘Abdel-Raḥman ash-Sharqāwī, who chose blank verse, establishing it as the new dramatic medium; and practically all who followed in this field, the most important among whom was Ṣalāh ‘Abdel-Ṣabūr. Behind Shawqī’s pioneering effort were the early translations of European drama, which were successfully adapted to the Egyptian theatre, initially imported in the late nineteenth century from the Levant but soon striking root in the Egyptian soil. The earliest extant Shakespearean translation dates as far back as 1900, namely Moḥamed ‘Iffat’s free — perhaps too free — translation of Macbeth. The early decades of the twentieth century saw a variety of adaptations, notably Sheīkh Salāma Ḥigāzī’s Shuhadā’ al-Gharām (Martyrs of Love) — a musical adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, presented to an audience brought up on the tradition of Ottoman music, and written in classical rhymed verse, in 1912. The full text is now lost, unfortunately, as most plays at the time were not printed but handwritten and the script left a great deal to the improvisation of individual performers, actors, and singers alike.
