A review of Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood.
Before I review Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood, I should confess I have never read The Tempest by William Shakespeare. I don’t know how I managed to get through high school and two Bachelor of Science degrees without it, but I did. While I enjoyed Atwood’s novel, I suspect I would have appreciated it even more if I were familiar with Shakespeare’s original play.
The novel follows Felix Phillips, a theatre director preparing to stage The Tempest at the Makeshiweg Theatre Festival. Felix arrives with big ambitions for the production, but his plans are shattered when he is fired from his position. The dismissal is a deep betrayal, orchestrated by his colleague Tony.
Plotting his revenge, Felix takes a part-time job running a Literacy through Literature program at a local prison. He begins to mount productions of Shakespeare using the inmates as actors. One of the most memorable aspects of the story is how the prisoners reinterpret the play: when they curse, they do so only with language drawn from the text, transforming their own voices through Shakespeare’s words.
Felix eventually engineers a plan to get back at his former colleagues, using his production of The Tempest as the vehicle for his vengeance. The staging becomes both a creative project and an instrument of retribution, blurring the lines between performance and real life.
Margaret Atwood’s prose is, as ever, sharp and descriptive. Her storytelling is inventive and layered, combining theatre, personal loss, and revenge with a sympathetic portrait of the inmates and their gradual reclamation of language and agency. Even without a firm grounding in Shakespeare’s play, the novel stands on its own as an engaging and thoughtful retelling.
I received an advanced copy of this book.