Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor in an Egyptian Adaptation: A Study in Cultural Appropriation

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The theory of adaptation is particularly applicable when examining M. Enani's Merry Wives, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor. Enani deals with Shakespeare's play as a main source of his play, trying to create a new Egyptian milieu for the events to suit the Egyptian reader and audience. Adaptation and appropriation are a practice of intertextuality. Enani translated the play into Egyptian Arabic. Enani felt that it would not be successful unless it was Egyptianized. To add local atmosphere, he titled his work Merry Wives, reformulated the names of the characters and changed the setting to an Egyptian suburb, Maadi, like Windsor Park in Shakespeare's play. Enani gave the characters native Egyptian names in place of foreign names. The entirety of Enani's play is written in Egyptian Arabic. Similar to Shakespeare’s play, Merry Wives is a farce comedy about the middle class, containing also characters both above and below it, but the events as a whole reflect the power and force of the middle-class. It is a comedy using physical humor and situational irony.

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