A Study of Selected Works on Shakespeare in Turkish Academia

Turkish audience became familiar with Shakespeare’s works in the middle of the 19th century thanks to the visiting troupes from Europe and Armenian actors’ performances in Türkiye. The first translations of Shakespeare’s plays, albeit initially from French to Turkish, were also seen in the second half of the 19th century. Although some journalists and critics reviewed Shakespearean performances in newspapers or literary magazines in this period, it took a considerable amount of time to evaluate the context of Shakespeare’s oeuvre and his dramatic approach in Türkiye. Only after the establishment of the Republic of Türkiye in 1923, Turkish intellectuals and scholars began to introduce and analyse Shakespeare in an array of different works. This essay sets out to investigate a selection of works featured in their attempt to introduce Shakespeare to the Turkish reader/audience from the 1930s to 2012. The article maps out some studies extensively bridging the gap between Türkiye and Shakespeare in various ways. The focus of the analysis will be on Cenap Şehabettin’s Vilyem Şekspiyer (William Shakespeare) (1931), Metin And’s “Türkiyede Shakespeare” (“Shakespeare in Türkiye”) (1964), Talât S. Halman’s Türk’ Shakespeare (Shakespeare the Turk) (2003), İnci Enginün’s Türkçede Shakespeare (Shakespeare in Turkish) (2008) and Türkiye’de Şekspir Olmak (Being Shakespeare in Türkiye) (2012) directed by Gülşah Özdemir Koryürek. The range of these works provides a comparative approach to initiate an argument about how Shakespeare is located in Turkish literature, culture, and academia.