Early Arabic Drama.

• Author: DeYoung, Terri

Until recently, drama has played the role of poor stepsister to poetry and the novel in Western studies of Arabic literature. This has, to a certain extent, reflected the situation in Arabic literary criticism itself The relative lack of serious studies devoted to the drama has, however, slowly been changing in the Arab world since the 1960s. Partly as a reflection of this, in the last decade several introductory works have appeared in the West that deal, in whole or in part, with Arabic drama, and especially the beginnings of modern Arabic drama in the late nineteenth century.

Professor Badawi's book is the latest entry in this series, which also includes Matti Moosa's The Origins of Modern Arabic Fiction (1983) and Mohamed A. Al-Khozai's The Development of early Arabic Drama (1847-1900) (1984). Each of these works has its own particular virtues, but Badawi's is clearly the most extensively documented and wide ranging. Thus, it goes beyond the category of introductory work and recommends itself to specialists, as well as novices, as a useful reference manual for more detailed research into the subject.

The book itself is divided into four parts. An introductory chapter briefly catalogues various indigenous literary kinds, like the shadow play and the ta ziya (the "passion play" recounting the events leading to the death of the Prophet's grandson, Husayn), which preceded the introduction of Western-inspired drama in the latter half of the nineteenth century. This chapter is probably the most theoretically interesting in the book, in that the author argues quite convincingly that these predecessors had an important thematic and structural influence on Western drama when it was adapted, channeling it toward comedy rather than tragedy, and mandating an extensive use of poetry and musical interludes within the plays.

Following this historical introduction, the author devotes a long chapter to a study of Ya'qub Sannu, the writer and journalist who pioneered drama in Egypt. Like all of the studies of individual dramatists in Early Arabic Drama, this chapter contains extensive summaries of the plots of Sannu's major plays and attempts to provide a comprehensive evaluation of his contribution to the development of theater in the Arab world.

This chapter is succeeded by one treating the works of three pioneering Syrian dramatists: Marun al-Naqqash, his nephew Salim, and Ahmad Abu khalil al-Qabanni. the fact that this chapter follows the one about...