Abstract

The concept of misprision was originally defined by Harold Bloom in his 1973 edition of The Anxiety of Influence. The term itself was not unknown to Shakespeare, who used it in one of his sonnets. The American critic considers that value and originality are the result of a strong misreading on the part of the most talented writers, a misreading resulting from an anxiety that permeates the artist’s relation with his or her great predecessors, and which he names “poetic misprision”. Our aim in this paper is to study some of the ways in which Shakespeare ‘misreads’ mythological stories by creating theatrical performances where drama mirrors itself in a sort of mise-en-abyme meant to enhance meaning and to transgress borders between genres or between past and present visions.