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Description of  Shakespeare through Islamic Worlds (Spotlight on Shakespeare)

1032100842 pdf Shakespeare through Islamic Worlds investigates the peculiar absence of Islam and Muslims from Shakespeares canon. 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 text 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 in which he lived. Read more