Hag Seed by Margaret Atwood

 

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The Tempest is one of Shakespeare’s most intensely psychological plays. Like Othello, it is all about revenge, but it is also about forgiveness. It posits the question “How does a person that has been deeply wronged move beyond that injury?”

In the play, Prospero, the deposed Duke of Milan, and his daughter are living on island in the middle of the sea. Prospero has ordered the sprite Ariel to a create a storm that ship-wrecks the people that removed him from power – Antonio and Sebastian. Prospero plots his revenge, but eventually forgives those who acted against him once they agree to restore him to power.

Hag Seed is another in Hogarth’s series of Shakespearian updates. Written by Margaret Atwood, Hag Seed is an example of what happens when an excellent writer takes a wack at a good story. Ms. Atwood has presented a “meta” view of Shakespeare’s tale in a world of theater and prison. We are introduced to Felix, he artistic director of the Makeshiweg Festival, a summer selection of Shakespeare and other plays in Canada. Felix is prideful and oblivious to the machinations of his second in command, who has him removed from the festival and sent into obscurity. Twelve years later, Felix is running a theater program at a local prison. When he finds out that his nemesis is coming to the jail, he plots his revenge, using a performance of the Tempest to carry it out.

I really enjoyed this book. Ms. Atwood not only presents us with an updated version of The Tempest, she uses the play itself as a key plot device. This allows her to have characters to go beyond the story and delve into the meaning of the original play. By having Felix exact his revenge using the actions of Propsero, she presents a “meta” analysis of The Tempest, something she obviously relishes, as she has all of the main characters offer a final thought and prediction about the characters in The Tempest at the end of the book.

Dig into Hag Seed and enjoy The Tempest. Margaret Atwood has done a great job with both.

The Gap of Time by Jeanette Winterson

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It is not easy to create a piece of fiction that is based on someone else’s work. There are the inevitable comparisons. So, I give the writers recruited by Hogarth Shakespeare a lot of credit. Not only have they been asked to create such pieces, but their works are based on the works of the best-known English playwright.

By Mariusz Kubik, http://www.mariuszkubik.pl [Attribution, GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) or CC BY 2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons

In The Gap of Time, Dame Jeanette Winterson has taken on “A Winter’s Tale.” This is not one of Shakespeare’s best known, or most loved plays. Its plot is complicated, and its themes are jealousy, and mistrust. Unlike his tragedies, Shakespeare uses his stage to write about forgiveness. Briefly, there are accusations of infidelity, banishment, death and rebirth. For a full recap you can check out Spark Notes or another source.

Ms. Winterson has taken on a formidable task, and has created a good if not great in work in response. In the end notes she writes of how the themes of jealousy and forgiveness speak to her. She has moved many of the less important aspects of the original story to the background in order to write a tale focused on affects of jealousy on relationships. Beyond lovers, Ms. Winterson presents the green monster and its influence on friendships and the relationship between parents and children.

We meet Leo, head of a real estate development firm in London. He suspects that his wife, Mimi, and his best friend, Xeno, are having an affair. We follow Leo’s descent into temporary madness. His obsession takes over all aspects of his life. We are given an excellent trip through Leo’s head. The writing becomes more frenetic as Leo’s paranoia takes hold. As his thoughts darken, Ms. Winterson’s writing becomes ultra-focused, her sentences and paragraphs become shorter. We are enveloped in the green monster along with Leo.

Unfortunately, the rest of the book doesn’t quite live up to this first section. Maybe it is easier to write about the passion of jealousy than the thoughtfulness of forgiveness. It doesn’t help that Shakespeare has woven the weakest threads of this story into the last two-thirds of the play. There are many things events that were put into the play to move the plot along, but that do not really make sense in the story, and these were difficult to write around. Ms. Winterson does a good job in trying to keep the story together, but sometimes it does get away from her. There are just too many anomalies to allow the story to develop to the crescendo that it deserves.

If you are a someone, as I am, who likes to read adaptations. Then go ahead, and dig in. If you enjoy exploring how one writer can take the ideas of another and make them their own, then enjoy. I did.