ABSTRACT
The Romanian version, a loose translation of the French adaptation, conflates the names of the French authors Du Lac and Alboise and foregrounds William Shakespeare's famous play in its title. The large gap between Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice and the adapted version, as is obvious from the passage quoted above, raises interesting issues regarding the kind of Shakespeare that was disseminated trans-nationally and even trans-culturally in the mid-nineteenth century. The Shakespeare staged in Paris in 1830 was inevitably placed at the intersection of Romanticism, theater and revolution. The revolutionaries were determined to use the Crimean War for the opportunities it opened up to liberate the country from the Russian protectorate and to negotiate a greater autonomy for the two Romanian principalities from the Ottoman Empire. The Shakespearean Venice that crossed cultural boundaries in the nineteenth century was subjected to multiple recontextualization and radical rewriting.
