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The reception of Shakespeare from the late-nineteenth century to the early 1960s is characterized by Arabic translations, adaptations, and imitations. The aura of Shakespeare’s canon is preserved and represented as a mythical space in the first productions. The second stage, from the late 1960s up to the present, has been characterized by postcolonial disavowal and revisions of power relationships through the practice of ‘double critique’. Shakespeare’s diverse representations on Arab stages amount to portraits of the self in a world out of joint. These negotiations are no longer parts of a resistance to Western ‘masks of difference’ or the Prospero-Caliban model of postcolonial writing-back, a writing characterized by the refusal of the West and the claiming of Othello back to his Atlas origins. Since the end of the 1960s, these Shakespearean offshoots have also become powerful strategies for revisions of power in the Arab world.