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Reading Shakespeare:The Bibliotheca Alexandrina's Third Annual Shakespeare Conference

Alexandria— The Bibliotheca Alexandrina held on Monday April 30th the third annual Shakespeare conference under the heading of "Reading Shakespeare." The event included lectures by Prof. Ann Thompson, Dean of the School of Humanities in King's College, University of London, and co-editor of the new Arden Shakespeare edition of Hamlet; Dr. Ismail Serageldin, Director of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina; Prof. Amira Nowaira, Professor of English Literature at the Faculty of Arts, University of Alexandria; and Mr. Paul Smith, Director of the British Council in Cairo.

Professor Thompson's lecture, titled "Who Needs Three Texts of Hamlet? An Editor's Perspective," focused on the problem of Shakespearean editorship, particularly of Hamlet, and argued for the necessity of studying all three available texts of the play instead of relying on "conflated texts" that limit the possibility of fully understanding Shakespeare's intention and a possible revision and development process. The Arden edition of the play co-edited by Prof. Thompson offers the reader all the three main texts of the play. The three texts were originally in 1603 (the First Quarto edition, known as a "bad" quarto and generally believed to be a pirated or otherwise "bootlegged" version), 1604 (the Second Quarto, twice the length of the first and believed to be more reliable), and 1623 (the Folio edition, published six years after the playwright's death). The sometimes radical differences between the three versions have prompted editors of conflated-text editions to make difficult decisions, such as the inclusion or exclusion of Hamlet's last soliloquy which appears only in the Second Quarto (Q2). Although the popularity of Hamlet has guaranteed the success of such technically-charged edition, Prof. Thompson notes the difficulty of achieving a similar level of support for a production of a more obscure Shakespearean drama such as Troilus and Cressida.

In the second lecture, Dr. Serageldin compared the hidden patterns in the construction of Shakespearean drama to the geometrical phenomena of kaleidoscope and fractals. Under the heading of "The Divided Self and the Counter-Voice," Dr. Serageldin offered an analysis of the racist voice in The Merchant of Venice, pointing out the strong presence of the counter-voice, mainly in the form of Shylock's famous speech in which he argues vociferously for the equality of Mankind. While Shakespeare manages to implicitly split apparent unanimity into hidden conflict, he also brings opposing elements together in the same character, as in his characterization of Othello, the military leader who functions both as outsider in and protector of the city of Venice in the play Othello. While commonly considered a play 'about' jealousy, Dr. Serageldin offered an analysis of Othello as a tragedy of alienation concerned with the assimilation and integration (or lack thereof) of immigrants.

Prof. Nowaira offered in her lecture, "From Text to Film: Visual Representations of Hamlet on the Screen" an elaborate comparison between three major cinematic productions of Shakespeare's tragic masterpiece: the 1948 film directed by and starring Sir Lawrence Olivier in the title role, Franco Zefirelli's 1990 production in which Mel Gibson played the Danish Prince, and Kenneth Branagh's 1996 full-length (four-hour) picture which he also directed and starred in. Prof. Nowaira's comparative study focused on the directors' approaches to the text. Olivier and Zefirelli opt for a purely Freudian interpretation of the text and duly highlight the relationship between Hamlet and his mother, excluding the political context in which the events of the play take place. Branagh's reading of the text, on the other hand, presents the reader with a much more political version of the play, as it brings to the foreground the political realities of Hamlet's life and the significance of the final transfer of power to the Norwegian Fortinbras—a section of the plot completely excluded from the two earlier versions.

In the final lecture, entitled "'To Tell the Truth:' Reading Events in Shakespeare's Plays," Paul Smith discussed the elements that, in his opinion, constitute the radical difference between "literature" and Shakespeare's medium of drama. Smith spoke of "experience" as the medium through which drama works, as opposed to the centrality of "words" to literature. Drama then becomes unique in that it functions in the same manner as our living consciousness: through immediate experience, unalloyed by memory, reflection, or other factors that taint the urgency of perception. Elaborating on these ideas, Smith offered the audience a reading of Hamlet as a play that revolves around the nature and function of drama and its dependence on accident and interruption, citing the failure of every attempt by the character of the play to manipulate events to influence the future.

The annual Shakespeare conference, organized by Prof. Azza el Kholy, Professor of English Literature at the University of Alexandria, is held in April in commemoration of the legendary playwright's birthday. The successful event was attended by a large number of students of Shakespeare, as well as prominent academicians of English literature and Shakespearean studies.