Margaret Atwood has not only reimagined The Tempest in a contemporary setting, she has created a frame with a Tempest-like plot in which staging a production of the play itself occurs. This intricate arrangement brings to mind another work by William Shakespeare, the Players's performance within Hamlet.
The frame both matches and departs from Shakespeare's play. The father is named Felix, but the daughter is still Miranda. Rather than a duke, he is a theater director. Rather than blown away onto an island, they are exiled in a remote rural area.
The play production aspect adds several new wrinkles. Felix, years past his professional prime, is hired to work with prison inmates, and they put on a modernized hip-hop/rap version that seriously refigures the text's language as well as its setting. His discussions with the inmates offer a vehicle for many of the critical questions that have been raised about the racial and colonialist issues in the original, especially Prospero's enslavement of Caliban.
The book is one of a series of modern retellings commissioned by Hogarth Festival. Critical reception overall was good, although some found the raps unconvincing. The plot has been criticized as contrived due to the way in which Felix's rival from the theater world is brought in.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/239449/hag-seed-by-margaret-atwood/9780804141314/readers-guide/
Sunday, December 1, 2019
Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood is a contemporary novel based on Shakespeare's The Tempest. Do you have anything on it, please?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
What is the theme of the chapter Lead?
Primo Levi's complex probing of the Holocaust, including his survival of Auschwitz and pre- and post-war life, is organized around indiv...
-
The statement "Development policy needs to be about poor people, not just poor countries," carries a lot of baggage. Let's dis...
-
"Mistaken Identity" is an amusing anecdote recounted by the famous author Mark Twain about an experience he once had while traveli...
-
Primo Levi's complex probing of the Holocaust, including his survival of Auschwitz and pre- and post-war life, is organized around indiv...
-
De Gouges's Declaration of the Rights of Woman was enormously influential. We can see its influences on early English feminist Mary Woll...
-
As if Hamlet were not obsessed enough with death, his uncovering of the skull of Yorick, the court jester from his youth, really sets him of...
-
In both "Volar" and "A Wall of Fire Rising," the characters are impacted by their environments, and this is indeed refle...
No comments:
Post a Comment