In conjunction with Shakespeare’s 400th anniversary last year, Hogarth Press has been publishing Shakespeare retellings by prominent authors: Jeanette Winterson retells The Winter’s Tale, Howard Jacobson takes on The Merchant of Venice, Anne Tyler spins a tale on The Taming of the Shrew, etc. Margaret Atwood’s contribution to the project a few months ago was a very smart retelling of Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
The gist of her retelling, called Hag-Seed, is this: Felix, artistic director of the Makeshiwig Theatre Festival, is working on a production of The Tempest when he is unfairly usurped by his devious assistant. Exiling himself to a remote part of Ontario for several years with only an imaginary daughter for company, he begins plotting his revenge. He takes an unusual job at a prison where he teaches Shakespeare to inmates and eventually plans a way to exact revenge on the people who wronged him through their production of The Tempest.
If I were to use one word to describe this book, it would be clever. Since teaching Shakespeare is a part of the plot, Atwood weaves a lot of analytical discussion and speculation about Shakespeare’s characters into the book, which I liked. Felix is also insistent the inmates look for swear words in Shakespeare’s plays and use those instead of the standard curse words in class, which made the swearing both really funny (I don’t usually associate Middle English with prison inmates) and more intelligent (I hate it when people use the F word between every single syllable with no thought of how it even makes sense).
There were a few parts that dragged for me, but I liked reading about how the inmates reimagined Shakespeare’s plays. With them interpreting the play so differently than the mainstream, it illustrates just how many hidden layers you can find in Shakespeare.
I feel like a lot of retellings these days are almost too perfect: there are straight lines drawn from a plot point in the original and a plot point in the modern. This is not one of those tales. Instead, it loosely tells the story of The Tempest, but primarily draws on the raw emotions of Shakespeare’s original work and brings it to a modern age.
3.5 stars.
BOOKBURGER 