87 pages • 2 hours read
Margaret AtwoodHag-Seed: William Shakespeare's The Tempest Retold
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2016A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Part 2, Chapters 10-19Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “A Brave Kingdom”
Part 2, Chapter 10 Summary: “Auspicious Star”
The date is January 7, 2013. Felix meets with Estelle, who tells him that two ministers will be attending the screening of his play after hearing about the success of his Shakespeare program: Justice Minister Sal O’Nally and a newcomer to politics, Tony. Felix decides that the 2013 play will be The Tempest. Felix assures Estelle that the play will be beneficial for the students because it’s about prison, though he leaves out the theme of revenge.
Part 2, Chapter 11 Summary: “Meaner Fellows”
Felix chats with the prison guards. He tells them the next play will be The Tempest and there will be plenty of revenge and metaphorical fights.
Part 2, Chapter 12 Summary: “Almost Inaccessible”
Felix avoids the other teachers and prison-rights activists that visit the prison. They have already questioned the value of his program, preferring real-world practical skills and therapy for the prisoners. They worry that Felix uses the prisoners as an experiment in Shakespearean studies. Felix admires his theater of cold cement and bars.
Part 2, Chapter 13 Summary: “Felix Addresses the Players”
The Fletcher Correctional Players vary in age, race, and sentence. The requirement for this first meeting was to read the playbook. Like Estelle and the guards, the prisoners question the selection of The Tempest because there are no fight scenes. They worry about being cast as Ariel or Miranda, “girly” characters that would hurt their reputation and safety in the prison. Felix reveals that he will hire a woman to come in and play the role of Miranda. Felix encourages his students to memorize lines by smuggling them cigarettes.
Part 2, Chapter 14 Summary: “First Assignment: Curse Words”
The date is January 9, 2013. The first lines the prisoners memorize are the slurs and colonialist language of the play.
Part 2, Chapter 15 Summary: “Oh You Wonder”
The date is January 10, 2013. Felix casts Anne-Marie Garland to play Miranda. A former gymnast, Anne-Marie was cast in Felix’s doomed adaptation of The Tempest 12 years before. Since then, Anne-Marie hasn’t had any lead roles. When they meet to discuss the role, Felix reveals that he will play the role of Prospero. He tells her his rules: No one knows him as Felix Phillips, only as Felix Duke, and all swear words must be from the play instead of contemporary life.
Part 2, Chapter 16 Summary: “Invisible to Every Eyeball Else”
The date is January 11, 2013. Felix shows a video of Anne-Marie’s dance performance to the prisoners. None of them wants to play the role of Ariel: The character is a male spirit, but the feminine connotations of Ariel’s role are too emasculating for these men, whose masculinity can save them in prison. Felix helps the men reimagine Ariel as an alien with a mission. Ariel aids Prospero in his illusions to buy his freedom from the sorcerer. The prisoners are convinced, and all volunteer to play Ariel.
Part 2, Chapter 17 Summary: “The Isle is Full of Noises”
Felix warms himself up in his shack home. He plans his revenge on Tony and Sal. Ideally, Tony and Sal will watch the screening of the play from the sealed wing. The prisoners will also watch the play, but Tony and Sal will be a part of Felix’s grand plan. He conjures the image of Miranda and fantasizes that they play a chess game together.
Part 2, Chapter 18 Summary: “This Island’s Mine”
The date is January 14, 2013. Felix discusses the story of Caliban with the prisoners. Caliban’s mother, Sycorax, was the first to find the island. Prospero, the rightful Duke of Milan, arrived later with his baby daughter Miranda after his brother Antonio betrayed him. Washing up on the island saved their lives, but Prospero knows he cannot reclaim his past while secluded there. He enslaves Caliban, who makes a deal with Stephano and Trinculo (Antonio’s butler and jester, shipwrecked alongside him) to get rid of Prospero in exchange for ownership of the island. Felix describes the island as “a kind of mirror: each one sees in it a reflection of his inner self. Maybe it brings out who you really are. Maybe it’s a place where you’re supposed to learn something” (117). As the Fletcher Correctional Players analyze character intention and select characters to audition for, Felix catches himself talking out loud about the island as a theater.
Part 2, Chapter 19 Summary: “Most Scurvy Monster”
The date is January 15, 2013. As Felix bathes, he wonders about where Prospero or Miranda would have bathed and how they would have maintained their privacy with Caliban leering and Ariel standing guard.
Because so many Players want to audition for Caliban, Felix discusses the character, typically depicted as a subhuman monster, the next day. The prisoners see Caliban’s humanity in his sexuality and human mother. Felix identifies Caliban’s desire to become rightful king of the island and populate it by raping Miranda. Felix tries to engage the prisoners in a discussion of what a prison is, saying that there are at least seven in the play but thinking privately that there are nine.
Part 2, Chapters 10-19 Analysis
Part 2 of Hag-Seed immediately raises the tension of the plot. It comprises short chapters with repetitive dates that recall the promise of danger in the Prologue, like a countdown to the main event. The rise in tension parallels the structure of a Shakespearean play. In the second act of a Shakespearean play, the action rises to set up the climax of the third. Atwood draws on this structure in her own novel, preparing readers for the climax with an immediate upping of the stakes when Estelle reveals that Tony will attend Felix’s next Shakespeare screening. The moment that Felix has spent 12 years waiting for reveals itself in a quick beat. In Part 1, Felix was patient, certain that his opportunity would eventually arrive. Now, the opportunity to take his revenge on Tony has fallen into his lap.
In these chapters, the prison setting becomes symbolic. It is both a physical space and a state of mind. There is the literal prison, the Fletcher County Correctional Institution, in which prisoners convicted of breaking the law serve their sentences. There is the prison of Prospero’s island, where he and other characters in The Tempest find both refuge and imprisonment: Unable to leave, the characters are stuck together as they resent their pasts and fitfully hope for their futures. There is also the prison of the mind. Felix is imprisoned by his bitterness. Revenge is his only goal, and this single-mindedness keeps Felix from moving on with his life. Felix also continues to revive Miranda through willful hallucinations, further imprisoning himself in his own mind. Felix has not accepted his daughter’s death or his firing from the theater festival. Instead of moving through and past these challenges, Felix freezes his life in a perpetual haze of anger, manipulating himself and others. His conversations with his students lack empathy. Felix believes he is above teaching and holds on to his subtle superiority complex over his students. His students are in a literal prison—one that will impact the rest of their lives. This is a vastly different circumstance than Felix’s mental imprisonment, but he encourages the prisoners to consider metaphorical forms of prison, degrading the integrity of the experiences the men in his Shakespeare class face.
Felix’s lack of empathy for his students further confirms his role as Prospero. In The Tempest, Prospero holds Caliban and Ariel hostage. In imprisoning Caliban and Ariel with promises of future freedom, Prospero places them in the same position as the prisoners Felix works with. Ariel creates the illusions that Prospero takes credit for, just as Felix takes credit for the Shakespeare performances that the Fletcher prisoners memorize and perform. Thus, the prisoners in Felix’s class can be seen as Caliban and Ariel, while Felix embraces his role as Prospero. He saves Prospero’s sorcerer costume for just the right moment, and he even casts himself as Prospero in the play, taking the role from a deserving student.
These chapters’ last connection to The Tempest is the 12 years that have elapsed since Felix’s firing; Prospero also waited 12 years before he got the chance to take his revenge on Antonio. This coincidence raises the question of whether Felix purposefully waited 12 years so he could replicate the timeline of The Tempest. Because Felix is an unreliable narrator, it is difficult to trust his intentions and perspective.
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By Margaret Atwood
