Shakespeare through Islamic Worlds investigates the peculiar absence of Islam and Muslims from Shakespeares corpus. While many of Shakespeares plays were set in the Mediterranean, a geography occupied by Muslim empires and cultures, his work eschews direct engagement with the religion and its people.
Shakespeare through Islamic Worlds investigates the peculiar absence of Islam and Muslims from Shakespeares corpus. While many of Shakespeares plays were set in the Mediterranean, a geography occupied by Muslim empires and cultures, his work eschews direct engagement with the religion and its people. This erasure is striking given the popularity of this topic in the plays of Shakespeares contemporaries.
By exploring the limited ways in which Shakespeare uses Islamic and Muslim tropes and topoi, Ambereen Dadabhoy argues that Islam and Muslim cultures function as an alternate or shadow subtext in his works, ranging from his staged Mediterranean plays to his histories and comedies. By consigning the diverse cultures of the Islamic regimes that occupied and populated the early modern Mediterranean, Shakespeare constructs a Europe and Mediterranean freed from the presence of non-white, non-European, and non-Christian Others, which belied the reality of the world he occupied.
Focusing on the Muslims and the margins of Shakespeares works, Dadabhoy reveals that the religion and its cultures informed plots, themes, and intellectual investments of Shakespeares canon. She puts Islam and Muslims back into the geographies and stories from which Shakespeare had evacuated them. This innovative book will be of interest to all those working on race, religion, global and cultural exchange within Shakespeare, as well as people working on Islamic and Asian studies within literature and the early modern period.
