Food Symbolism and Imagery in the Polish Translations of William Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor

Abstract

The paper presents Polish equivalents of William Shakespeare’s food vocabulary based on The Merry Wives of Windsor. The analysis entails all Polish versions of the comedy, both its nineteenth-century renditions and contemporary post-war readings. The research aims to demonstrate how the lexical choices of Polish authors affect the interpretation of the play; in particular, it seeks to answer the question of how the imagery and symbolism of Shakespeare’s food vocabulary were altered in the process of translation.