Hag-Seed: William Shakespeare's The Tempest Retold

The final chapters of Hag-Seed explore philosophical questions of morality and goodness.

When the employees and prisoners of the Fletcher Correctional Institution first heard that Felix was staging The Tempest, they were disappointed that there weren’t traditional fight scenes. Guards and prisoners alike enjoyed the playacting of swords, duels, and murder. The tantalizing aspect of acted-out violence is the fakeness of it and the power dynamics: Nothing reflects more directly on someone’s victory than surviving a sword fight, but these fights also place prisoner-actors and guard-audience members outside of themselves. Traditional sword duels and wars fought with blades are no longer part of contemporary reality, so Shakespearean physical fights are an entertaining way of transporting both the prisoners and the guards outside of their own world’s violence.

However, The Tempest subtly conveys a darker fight than the kind fought with swords. Prospero enslaves Ariel and Caliban largely through psychology because he knows that to flex his power as a supposedly higher being is a form of violence enacted on the dignity of Ariel and Caliban. For 12 years, both Prospero and Felix nurture their innermost violent tendencies, waiting for the moment when they can express this violence. Though Felix doesn’t kill anyone in his revenge plan, the possibility that someone could have gotten critically hurt is too obvious to ignore. Felix barely considers the idea that drugging Tony and company could seriously damage their health or even kill them. Just because the physical fight doesn’t manifest doesn’t mean that the intention isn’t subconsciously there. Violence against others can also take the form of emotional abuse and manipulation; these acts of violence appear in both The Tempest and in Hag-Seed. Felix ignores the well-being of his prisoner-students, highlighting a form of violence: lack of concern for the human dignity and potential of others.

Hag-Seed also explores violence against self. Felix spends 12 years depriving himself of human connection, comfortable lodgings, and true happiness. His grief over the loss of Miranda and his resentment of Tony morphs into self-abuse. Felix is largely unaware that he tortures himself over the wrongs he has experienced. In not moving on with his life in a healthy way, Felix sentences himself to over a decade of unnecessary pain. Felix may work in a prison, but he makes a prison of his own mind—a prison in which only Felix exists, without help or hope.

The issue of violence is intimately connected with power dynamics. Felix doesn’t want his job as artistic director back; his revenge plan is about asserting dominance over Tony, who once asserted dominance over Felix. Though Felix acts with kindness towards the prisoners, he views himself as smarter and better than they are. In his role as teacher, he asserts his power over prisoners who have nothing else to do but try to learn Shakespeare to connect with others and the outside world. Felix feels that he suffered oppression, but he reenacts oppression in his manipulation of the prisoners, who don’t know how little he actually thinks of them. His desire for power similarly tints his opinions about Anne-Marie. Though Anne-Marie is a confident woman, Felix perceives her through a paternalistic lens. He is constantly concerned about her safety around the male prisoners, and he condescends to her creative ideas and feelings, which he sees as girly and therefore admirable only for their cuteness. He subconsciously abuses Anne-Marie by not giving her the respect due to her. This abuse is a product of Felix’s sense of himself as more powerful than others.

The way Felix uses other people for his own gains parallels themes from The Tempest that the prisoners identify in their post-show analyses. The prisoners analyze the ways in which oppressed people will use any freedom they have to oppress others. When someone is powerless, any attempt to reclaim that power can escalate into violence against others. The threat of this is alive and well within characters like Ariel and Caliban. In the original Shakespearean play, concerns around freeing Ariel and Caliban are based on the inevitability of their vengeance on their oppressors. Prospero can only free them if and when he teams up with other, more powerful men who can defend him against the resentments he’s nurtured in his prisoners. This is echoed in Felix’s acknowledgment that he has angered and used enough people that, in the future, someone might manipulate a situation to get back at him. The implication is that if someone wants revenge against you, it means that you have at one point or another had the upper hand and won out against that person. In other words, Felix would rather be a Prospero than a Gonzalo.

The conversation around power dynamics includes a study of goodness. In these chapters, Bent Pencil argues that Gonzalo is a truly good character. Gonzalo’s goodness is a direct result of his lack of access to power: Atwood suggests that powerless people are good people because they have no ability to plan violence against others. The moral question of Part 5 shifts from Felix’s intentions to the intersection of badness and power. In The Tempest, even good deeds reflect ulterior motives, raising the question of whether a person can avoid the temptation to abuse power once they have it. In studying Felix or Tony, the answer is no. However, Felix and Tony are flawed characters from the outset, motivated by greed, grief, and ambition; they are not ideal protagonists. Therefore, Atwood leaves the question open-ended for her reader.  

The final chapters of Hag-Seed also explore the issue of redemption. 8Handz receives early parole but faces “imprisonment” on a cruise boat with Felix, just as Ariel remains tied to Prospero even after Prospero’s liberation. If 8Handz is the novel’s version of Ariel, his redemption story is tied to service to Felix, which doesn’t seem much like redemption at all. 8Handz doesn’t owe anything to Felix, but because Felix finds use in 8Handz, Felix rationalizes including 8Handz on the cruise as a way of helping him acclimate to freedom. Furthermore, though the prisoners are proud of their work and empowered by their Shakespearean studies, the immersive play experience could have ended very badly, exposing them to potential charges of harming or even killing powerful Canadian men. Thus, Felix taints even their redemption, using them to fulfill his own self-prophecy without considering the danger he is placing them in. Notably, even Felix doesn’t receive the redemption he desired. He gets everything he wants from Tony, but the victory is hollow because his true tragedy is the death of his daughter. Felix somewhat redeems himself by setting Miranda free, but because he is still unhappy, he remains imprisoned.

Atwood’s structure again parallels the structure of a Shakespearean play. The fifth act of a Shakespearean play leads to resolutions and conclusions. In Part 5, Atwood resolves Felix’s problems with Tony. Atwood further parallels the structure of The Tempest through her Epilogue. In The Tempest, the play cannot end without Prospero asking the audience for their approval and prayers. Though Felix doesn’t have an audience, he does have the specter of Miranda. When Felix acknowledges how selfish his possession of Miranda was, he decides to set her free and move on. This release is like a metaphorical request for Miranda to forgive and approve of him, linking Felix with Prospero for one final and crucial moment.