"What was the modern-day equivalent of a magician marooned on an island for 12 years with a now adolescent daughter? You couldn’t write that straight. […] And what about the flying air spirit? And the Caliban figure?
Calm, calm, I told myself. I read the play again, this time backwards. The last three words Prospero says are “Set me free.” But free from what? In what has he been imprisoned?
I started counting up the prisons and imprisonments in the book. There are a lot of them. In fact, every one of the characters is constrained at some point in the play. This was suggestive. […] So I decided to set my novel in a prison."
I highly recommend that teachers, (or if you like, getting your students to read it as a supplementary reading after reading Hag-seed) read this article about how Magaret Attwood came to the idea in her re-tell of The Tempest. (Click on the image to download the article).
The article mentions the tough balancing act of keeping a recognizable Shakespeare play while bringing it into the twenty-first century as a work of fiction. It gives us insight into the specific challenges that Attwood faced when turning The Tempest into a narrative work.
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| Hag-Seed: A retelling of The Tempest |
After watching this interview with Margaret Attwood, I learnt about the prisoner who having read The Tempest, fell in love with Shakespeare and when he got out of prison, started teaching other inmates. He found it such a transformative experience he's made a career of teaching Shakespeare in prisons.
This video is very useful for getting students to think beyond and more deeply about the context and the author's motivation. What a brilliant woman she is. Her belief in reforms as opposed to just punishment. Using Shakespeare to make inmates more empathetic is just brilliant.
I'm amazed at the myriad of themes and topics that can be discussed with Advanced English students - their questions and interests to set directions for where our discussion and reading would take us. Great lesson on conventions and communication for positive participation in society. What an example of a "sidetrip" or useful tangent where we can explore such issues!
References:
Attwood, M. (2016). “A Perfect Storm: Margaret Atwood on Rewriting The Tempest.” The Guardian, September 24, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/sep/24/margaret-atwoodrewriting-shakespeare-tempest-hagseed.