Tragedy in the Arab Theatre: the Neglected Genre

Abstract

In this article Safi Mahmoud Mahfouz investigates the current state of tragedy in the Arab theatre and suggests some of the reasons behind the lack of an authentic Arabic tragedy developed from the Aristotelian tradition. Through analyses of the few translations and adaptations into Arabic of Shakespearean and classical tragedy, he both confirms and questions the claims of non-Arabic scholars that ‘the Arab mind is incapable of producing tragedy’. While the wider theatre community has been introduced to a handful of the Arab world's most prominent dramatists in translation, many are still largely unknown and none has a claim to be a tragedian. Academic studies of Arabic tragedy are insubstantial, while tragedy, in the classical sense, plays a very minor role in Arab drama, the tendency of Arab dramatists being towards comedy or melodrama. Safi Mahmoud Mahfouz is Head of the Department of English Language and Literature at UNRWA University, Amman, Jordan. His research interests include American Literature, Arabic and Middle Eastern literatures, modern and contemporary drama, contemporary poetics, comparative literature, and synchronous and asynchronous instructional technology.