My name's Caliban, got scales and long nails,I think I've been enjoying the Hogarth Shakespeare Series – I like the concept anyway (having popular authors update the Bard's plays) – but the ones I've read so far have all taken different approaches: Only with Vinegar Girl has the author (Anne Tyler) reimagined the play (Taming of the Shrew) as actual events happening in the modern day (which, before this series was begun, was the satisfying concept behind such books as A Thousand Acres and The Story of Edgar Sawtelle; not to mention Ian McEwan's recent Nutshell or even West Side Story). The other Hogarth entry I had previously read (Shylock is my Name by Howard Jacobson) went kind of meta; with the plot of The Merchant of Venice updated but the character of Shylock making a physical appearance in the narrative. And now with Hag-Seed, Margaret Atwood has decided to double down on the doubling: the main character, Felix Phillips, is a modern day Prospero – having had his “dukedom” usurped and suffering a banishment of sorts – he waits his dozen years for “an auspicious star and Lady Fortune” to send his enemies into his path (which all follows the plotline, more or less, for The Tempest) and then he, self-aware of the parallels between real life and fiction, forces the revenge plot of the play to come to life; all while mounting a prisonhouse production of that same play. Something about the whole thing just felt a bit too clever and deliberate.
I smell like a fish and not like a man –
But my other name's Hag-Seed, or that's what he calls me,
He call me a lotta names, he play me a lotta games:
He call me a poison, a filth, a slave,
He prison me up to make me behave,
But I'm Hag-Seed!
Felix Phillips was the Artistic Director for a Stratford, Ontario-type theatre festival, and I got a good laugh at him describing the poor audience reception to his directorial excesses (and not least of all because I've witnessed some excess at Stratford myself):
The almost-naked freely bleeding Lavinia in Titus was too upsettingly graphic, they'd whined; though as Felix pointed out, more than justified by the text. Why did Pericles have to be staged with spacecrafts and extraterrestrials instead of sailing ships and foreign countries, and why present the moon goddess Artemis with the head of a praying mantis? Even though – said Felix to the Board, in his own defense – it was totally fitting, if you thought deeply about it. And Hermione's return to life as a vampire in The Winter's Tale: that had actually been booed. Felix had been delighted: What an effect! Who else had ever done it? Where there are boos, there's life!When his right-hand man replaces him as AD, Felix decides to go into hiding. Unlike Prospero, who had his three-year-old daughter with him when he was shipwrecked, Felix's own Miranda (yes, he had named her after the character) died in childhood, and as he embraced a hermit's life, Felix had only Miranda's ghost to keep him company. Eventually growing restless, after nine years Felix decides to look for contact with the outside world and he applies for a position teaching “Literacy Through Literature” at a correctional facility. As it turns out, Felix has a gift for teaching, and through studying and performing Shakespeare's plays, the inmates develop a variety of transferable skills. Atwood treats the prisoners with empathy and I enjoyed the writing as she described the prison setting:
There's a click. The door unlocks and he walks into the warmth, and that unique smell. Unfresh paint, faint mildew, unloved food eaten in boredom, and the smell of dejection, the shoulders slumping down, the head bowed, the body caving in upon itself. A meager smell. Onion farts. Cold naked feet, damp towels, motherless years. The smell of misery, lying over everyone within like an enchantment. But for brief moments he knows he can unbind that spell.When Felix learns that the literacy program is at risk of being cut in the new government's tough-on-crime agenda (and finds that, coincidentally, his old enemies from the theatre are the new Ministers for Justice and Heritage that will be touring the prison before lowering the axe), he manipulates his class into not only performing The Tempest (which they resist because it has none of the themes or battle scenes that the inmates had found relatable in earlier productions), he also involves them in criminal activity in order to exact his revenge.
The idea that Felix can recognise that his life mirrors the plot of The Tempest isn't a problem for me; especially as his “banishment” was self-imposed. Trying to play out his situation as Prospero would is fine too; why not follow a ready-made model for revenge? But when his enemies behave exactly like the characters from the play – even opening themselves to blackmail by discussing murder when they think no one can hear them – that's what feels too clever; and especially since one of these men took over as the festival's AD and presumably is familiar with The Tempest and would understand that he was behaving exactly like one of its characters.
As for the prison scenes: On the one hand, I liked that we got to see Felix interact with the inmates and guide them along in their understanding of the play and its characters. On the other hand, this went on so long that it felt more like Atwood was trying to make sure that I understood her sense of what it all means; and that felt heavy handed; show me, don't tell me. In the Acknowledgments, Atwood writes about the research she put into determining the value of literacy programs in prisons (I loved that she called one of my favourite books, The Enchanted, “astonishing”), but I'm left with the feeling that she values the ideal of literacy over the actual reality of prisoners: the men in Felix's class are thoroughly interchangeable and talk and act like stereotypes (but, hey, she had them add rap numbers to The Tempest; she's so street).
Here's my takeaway: Hag-Seed reads like Atwood is trying to improve on Shakespeare; I was totally aware of her voice throughout, and the play within a play within a novel based on a play wasn't an improvement upon the original play. The bit I liked best was Felix's self-imposed prison of grief – his exile and his being haunted – and how the noncredible plotline is used to finally free him (which I do understand is the actual point) but I was put off by too many of the details to have really enjoyed this. But what does Atwood care for this poor reader? After all, where there are boos, there's life!
Shylock is My Name
Vinegar Girl
The Gap of Time
Hag-Seed
New Boy
Dunbar
Macbeth
And Related:
Nutshell