Miranda gets a new life, of sorts, as a fleet, high-kicking dancer who can break Caliban’s scaly arms if she needs to. Felix and the prisoners will between them expose the corruption of those in power. All Felix’s obsessiveness and creativity stem from it: “Didn’t the best art have desperation at its core?” He must make his Miranda live again, and the prison drama class is the means he has to do it. But Felix’s young daughter Miranda has also died, and this unfathomable loss is at the heart of Atwood’s novel.
Imprisoning himself in a hovel on the edge of town, distilling his resentment, he is self-consciously playing out the play. Felix knows he’s a version of Milan’s deposed duke. Director Felix must make his daughter Miranda live again, and the prison drama class is the means he has to do itĮarly in the novel, Atwood’s hero Felix is ejected from the Shakespeare festival he has long directed, cast out from his beloved state by a ruthless factotum called Tony. The magic is sought in neither breathtaking style nor stillness but in resilience and communication. Though endings are much discussed, it’s a book of fretful striving rather than repletion. This Tempest is a chancy rock gig, glad of big noise and scuffled improvisation. Drug dealers supply hallucinogens as they did in the 16th century, but now the soundtrack is Metallica’s “Ride the Lightning”, and you wouldn’t want the humiliating results spread about on social media.Ī hundred years ago, enthralled and confounded by The Tempest, as so many novelists have been, Henry James imagined Shakespeare as a divine musician at close of day, playing the harpsichord, perhaps, held in the “lucid stillness of his style”, performing a blissfully solitary concert. It’s done with gusto and extravagance: the artful traps conceived by Prospero are realised by an Ariel called 8Handz whose dramaturgy is of the digital sort. Hag-Seed is the fourth novel in the Hogarth Shakespeare series, following Jeanette Winterson’s retelling of The Winter’s Tale, Howard Jacobson’s of The Merchant of Venice and Anne Tyler’s of The Taming of the Shrew.
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