ABSTRACT
The first Hebrew translations of complete Shakespeare plays appeared in Central and Eastern Europe in the final quarter of the nineteenth century, although Jewish authors had expressed admiration for the English playwright as far back as the first few decades of the Haskalah in the late 1700s and early 1800s. Moreover, following the arrival of the printing press in Italy in the mid-fifteenth century, the country became the centre of Hebrew publishing in Europe, a position it retained until the eighteenth century. A particularly fascinating aspect of the Maskilic Shakespeare translators' approach concerns their treatment of Italy. The Maskilic Hebrew translators of Othello, Romeo and Juliet, and The Taming of the Shrew were confronted by the unusual challenge of adapting English dramatic works set in Italy and exhibiting explicitly Italian cultural, religious, and linguistic features into ones suitable for a Hebrew-reading Eastern European Jewish audience with a very particular ideology.
