Clarissa's Blog

Hogarth Press has asked famous authors to write their own version of a favorite play by Shakespeare. I’m not going to read the entire series but I wanted to check out Margaret Atwood’s retelling of The Tempest. I’m not much of a Shakespeare person but this play I do know well because you can’t do any Latin American studies without being persecuted by The Tempest. It’s like Latin American essayists never read anything else, they bug you so with it.

The word I’d use to describe Atwood’s rewriting of The Tempest is cute.  And if you’ve read any Atwood you should know how uncharacteristic that is. Atwood’s writing is usually anything but cute. This novel, though, is exactly like one of those sappy Hollywood deals where a disillusioned artist / teacher comes to an inner-city school / jail / community college and through an art project he does with his atypical students achieves redemption. I kept waiting for some irony to kick in because Atwood tends to be anything but cheesy and sentimental but no, the sappy thing went on until the novel’s end. 

But hey, it’s not a bad novel. Atwood even write some Shakespeare-inspired raps for it. Yes, as I said, it’s all crazy cute. You can see that she engaged with Shakespeare on a profound level and didn’t just use him as a pretext. I even felt more enthusiastic about Shakespeare than I ever did after reading the novel. Hag-seed could be a good novel to assign to 8-graders.