Alfred de Vigny, poet, novelist, and dramatist, was an influential figure in the Romantic movement, particularly as it developed in the late 1820s and 1830s. His influence on the direction of French theater was profound, despite the fact that his dramatic output was relatively small. He completed only three original plays, each of which he saw produced and published, and a translation-adaptation of William Shakespeare's Othello (1604), which was the first of Vigny's plays to be produced. His three-act version of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice (1596), titled Shylock, Le Marchand de Venise (Shylock, The Merchant of Venice), was not published during his lifetime and not produced until after his death, when it was staged at the Comédie-Française on 7 April 1905. Although he worked on dramatic adaptations of the anonymous twelfth-century Chanson de Roland (The Song of Roland) and Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra (1606), he abandoned such ambitions...