Authors may dismantle and reconstruct elements of another text to remodel enduring ideas for new audiences, positioning us to embrace new perspectives, values and contexts. By dismantling and reconstructing the Jacobean drama ‘The Tempest’ (1610), Margaret Atwood is able to imitate William Shakespeare’s timeless ideas, through her postmodern novel ‘Hag-Seed’ (2016), which resonates with ‘The Tempest’ by exploring the ability for power to provoke vengeance while offering the value of forgiveness. However, by acknowledging the power of grief to constrain, she frames Shakespeare’s Jacobean with a more relatable dimension, offering a new insight on power.
Atwood recycles and reimagines ‘The Tempest’ insights on power for the purpose of engaging a modern audience with the timeless notion of revenge, warning readers about power’s capacity to imprison us. ‘The Tempest’ reflects the Jacobean value of the Great Chain of Being, which held that a person’s rank and position was decreed by God, and any violation would be punished. Shakespeare initiates this broken order through the pathetic fallacy, “a tempestuous noise of thunder and lightning heard”, this stage direction foreshadows a sense of chaos. He is able to effectively expose Prospero as a “master of a full poor cell”, alluding to the island as a jail, which we quickly realize is a plot of retribution after his forced abdication. His vengeance is established in the metaphor “my high charms work, and these, mine enemies, are all knit up”, as Shakespeare challenges the audience to condemn Prospero’s use of magic and the metaphoric “sweet airs” of the island to justify his revenge rather than seeking Christian redemption through forgiveness. As Prospero’s vengefulness fades, he forgives his enemies, “I am woe for’t, sir”, contrasting his qualities at the beginning of the play with his sudden necessity for forgiveness. Atwood significantly dismantles this vengeful protagonist by reconstructing Jacobean themes of political betrayal within a postmodern context, as opposed to losing a dukedom, Felix is dismissed as artistic director. Felix’s vindictive character resonates with Prospero, which is illustrated by the metaphor: “It rankles. It festers. It brews vengefulness”. The anaphora emphasizes the unnamed hatred towards Tony for his usurpation. Felix preserves his power by using the jail as his ‘island’ and a literacy program which allows his to direct his Tempest as ‘mine art.’ This metafictive intertextuality allows his to ensnare his prey, through the metaphor “he follows them through the vibrations of the web, playing spider to the butterflies”. Atwood forces the modern audience to question Felix’s lust for revenge, “Is extreme goodness always weak? Can a person be good only in the absence of power?”. This uncertainty catalyzes Felix’s transformation resembles Prospero’s apology, “It’s not my play… it’s our play”, showing Felix’s progress throughout the book parallels Prospero’s. The intertextual link to ‘The Tempest’, “he’ll break his staff, he’ll drown his book”, depicts Felix giving up his supremacy – magic, the theatre. Here Felix’s character collides with Shakespeare’s Prospero and is greatly reconstructed to reflect 21st century interpretations of control, while Atwood successfully cautions us to expel these self-destructive emotions.
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In ‘Hag-Seed’, Atwood dismantles and reconstructs Shakespeare’s portrayal of the role of power and its drive, making the protagonists insane, while captivating her contemporary audience with the significance of mental health and the toll it takes on people in power. In the Jacobean era, Shakespeare’s audiences understood Prospero’s madness to be a result of his indulgence in the dark arts and dominance, thus breaking Christian values. This is achieved initially through the setting, as Miranda expresses through the simile, that their life on the island is “rather like a dream”, presenting this motif of sleep as not only metaphorical, but depicts the island as a magical place that may only exist subconsciously. This idea becomes more prominent Prospero’s prisoners on the island begin to rhetorically question, “O, the heavens! What foul play had we that we came from thence? Or blessed was’t we did?”, as they begin to query their faith. It is ironic that Ariel, who carries out Prospero’s magical acts, is the catalyst for his redemption through a renewal of Christian values. The personification “I fear a madness held me,” conveys that Prospero has tempered both his anger and vengeance, and can stop enslaving Ariel to his dark arts. This is created through the hyperbole “shalt have the air at freedom” followed by the emotive language “be free, and fare thou well”. Atwood is able to rebuild Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’ by replacing Christian values, by engaging with Felix’s undiagnosed but evident depression, reflecting the modern understanding of the capacity for supremacy to catalyze poor mental health. Felix uses Miranda, his late daughter, as his Ariel – a map to freedom from power in the personification that she is “frozen in Time’s jelly… where she is visible, but not alive”, paradoxically conveying his poor mental health as a result of his grief and power. The motif of dreaming across the book and play allow for ‘sleep’ to be time for the protagonists to find their ‘guardian angels’: “Too much time alone with his grief eating away at him… He felt as if he were waking up from a long and melancholy dream”. Atwood uses the metaphor “How long will you keep yourself on this intravenous drip?”, implying that Miranda’s image is his metaphoric ‘intravenous drip’, the only thing keeping him alive. Felix finally lets go of Miranda, a parallel with Prospero letting go of Ariel with the intertextual reference “to the elements be free”, letting go of his grief and power. Atwood’s Felix and Shakespeare’s Prospero resonate as they both are mentally imprisoned and find that seeking retribution and power holding them back is the image of Miranda and Ariel, as Atwood effectively achieves a textural conversation and reconstruction of ‘The Tempest’.
Therefore, in ‘Hag-Seed’ Margaret Atwood recycles Shakespeare’s timeless notions of vengeance, and forgiveness, while dismantling and reconstructing them in order to engage a contemporary audience. She aims to position us to embrace 21st century insights on power, particularly its cause of destructive emotions through vengeance, but to reach redemption through forgiveness.
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