Muslim Hamlet

This is the CD cover of a Hamlet soundtrack--Bosnian director Haris Pašović's version of Hamlet, music performed by East West Orchestra. The music is "oriental/ambiental, improvisations based on classic Turkish themes."

Song number 3 is: "She's Conjunctive To My Life." (Sounds like a John Mayer title, if he wrote in Elizabethan.)

Claudius speaking about Gertrude (IV.vii.14-17):

She's so conjunctive to my life and soul,
That, as the star moves not but in his sphere,
I could not but by her.

Pašović's Hamlet is situated in a Turkish court instead of Danish. See a CNN World clip about this production here. From an interview with Pašović, on why he set it where he set it:

"It is a story about power, about rebellion, about human essence in all its greatness and all its irrelevance. Since this play is so universal that every epoch has its own Hamlet, I decided to refer to an empire that was a super-power during a certain period of history – the Ottoman Empire. It became interesting to me to view the whole story from the perspective of a powerful empire that encompassed several dozens of different peoples, cultural identities, and from the perspective of the Muslim world."

He continues:

"It may sound paradoxical, but I think that if he were to write Hamlet today, Shakespeare would set it in the Ottoman court . . . The structure of the Ottoman state is absolutely Shakespearian. That is something about which Shakespeare wrote in all his plays. I did not change the story, I have not changed anything in the story, I did not change the names, I only changed the titles; instead of king and queen, we use sultan and Valide-sultan, and where in the original there is a Christian religious reference, we have translated it into Islamic references."