Margaret Atwood, Hag-Seed (2016)
There’s a four-letter word in the English language which is often referred to as the F-bomb. To be honest, it’s not much of a bomb, being used so often that it’s more like a squirt from a water pistol. Its origin is doubtful but not its meaning. Once upon a time, its use was an indicator of social standing. Now, like a tattoo, it has inked itself into all sorts of speech, pushing other more interesting words aside as it does so.
I once heard a teacher say to a recalcitrant student that instead of telling somebody to ‘get fucked’, it might be better to say ‘go to hell.’ She was assisting the child with anger management, and we all need help with that from time to time. Nevertheless, it did cross my mind that telling somebody to ‘go to hell’ was consigning them to darkness and despair for all eternity. Telling them to ‘get fucked’, on the other hand, is inviting them to have an experience of love. I can’t see why the former should be considered more pleasant than the latter. Language is funny like that. We can’t make rules without it and yet it doesn’t seem to follow too many rules of its own.
I have noticed young people using the F-word as a crutch without realising how little support it actually offers. I have seen a boy in Year 6, aged eleven, use the word in the company of older boys, trying to impress them with his manliness. It didn’t work. The older boys told him to F-off, demonstrating the correct intonation. The difference was that the older boys were more practised with their clichés. It is sad when people want to express themselves and have nothing but clichés with which to do it.
This is where Shakespeare can change lives. The common wisdom is that there are two Shakespeares: the one on the page and the one on the stage. They are both wonderful but being part of an audience with live actors is different from being on your own with a live imagination. There is a third Shakespeare as well, and this is Shakespeare in the classroom. It’s not everybody’s cup of tea. I once taught a young man who wasn’t much interested in English but did love sport. Unfortunately, a dreadful accident at training left him in a wheelchair. He was determined to look on the bright side. ‘At least it got me out of Macbeth,’ he said when I visited him in hospital.
I have never had a student who didn’t understand the story of Macbeth, even if some of them thought it must have been borrowed from the scenario of a computer game. Most of them understood the characters and themes. A good number got the historical agenda of a Scottish king and others got the gags: in the famous porter’s scene, Shakespeare tells the same phallic joke on seven separate occasions and each time it’s funny. Duncan is dead and the audience is waiting for the body to be discovered so that mayhem can be unleashed upon the world, but Shakespeare has some bawdy humour he wants us to share first and everything else has to wait. Even with all these attributes,| Macbeth could still be a short story and make the same impact. Macbeth is Macbeth because of the rolling, crashing surf of its language. I want students to jump into that surf and enjoy its energy.
My teaching has been aided by an entertaining resource known as the Shakespeare Insult Kit, the work, apparently, of a teacher in Indiana called Jerry Maguire. It has three columns. You start with the word ‘Thou’, choose an adjective at random from the first column, another from the second and pin them both to a noun from the third. Presto.
| Thou | cockered | fen-sucked | flax-wench |
| Thou | surly | nut-fed | rump hook |
| Thou | weedy | guts-griping | hedge pig |
| Thou | paunchy | hell-hated | maggot-pie |
And so on. And on. Hours of fun for the whole class. Generally, the students loved it and began to play around with strange words. It was a bit like getting kids to try new flavours in their food. For their homework, they had to use a choice insult in a place they would otherwise be tempted to detonate the F-bomb. Then they had to describe the experience. I got them to write Shakespearean restaurant reviews and Shakespearean sports commentary. Then they could make up their own bad words. If you liberate people’s language, you are on the way to liberating them, and that’s the whole point of teaching.
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You often get the impression that the Canadian writer Margaret Atwood (born 1939) enjoys her craft. This is probably just as well because she was at it for years before The Handmaid’s Tale, published in 1985, established her name. Hag-Seed, her retelling of one of Shakespeare’s final plays, The Tempest, appeared when she was in her mid-seventies. It puts the lie to any idea that mature writers reach the point where they have had their day and their bones start to creak. Hag-Seed is a lot of fun. It is quirky and slick and nimble, and it does acrobatics to get the reader’s mind moving. It has a healthy appetite for Shakespearean bad language.
You don’t need to know The Tempest to enjoy Hag-Seed but, by the end, you will be hunting for a copy. The original drama tells the story of Prospero, the rightful duke of Milan, who has been tricked out of his position by his brother Antonio. Along with his daughter, fair Miranda, he is exiled to an island somewhere without the comfort of Club Med. Here he looks after Caliban, described in the cast list as a ‘savage and deformed slave’ and by Prospero himself as a ‘demi-devil’. Caliban is the son of a witch, Sycorax, and possibly Prospero himself (‘this thing of darkness I acknowledge mine’). The play begins with a storm at sea, conjured by Ariel, the fairy servant who does Prospero’s bidding, which brings ashore Prospero’s usurper, Antonio, as well as the king of Milan and the king’s fetching son, Ferdinand, destined to marry Miranda. This is a bland description: The Tempest, one of Shakespeare’s shorter works, is a box of firecrackers.
Margaret Atwood centres her novel on a production of The Tempest by prisoners inside Fletcher County Correctional Institute. The director is Felix, a name that suggests prosperity, who was deposed twelve years earlier as the artistic director of the Makeshiweg Festival by a ‘devious, twisted bastard’ called Tony (Antonio). Felix’s wife had died after a year of marriage, only to be followed by his daughter, Miranda, when she contracted meningitis, aged three. After a long exile in a remote shack, Felix reinvents himself as Mr Duke (get it?) and gets a chance to stage The Tempest, a long-held dream, even if he has to do it with ‘thieves, drug dealers, embezzlers, man-slaughterers, fraudsters, and con men’. By the time the performance comes round, Tony and his cronies are wielding power in government. They come to Fletcher with the idea of closing down artistic programs that seem to be rewarding crime. Atwood turns them into the crew that comes onto Prospero’s island. Like Prospero, Felix winds them up in his kind of magic and gets all the revenge he wants, plus a bit extra thrown in for good measure.
Theatre in general and Shakespeare in particular have had a fascinating relationship with prison. Prison populations famously have low rates of literacy, a reminder that crime, like weeds, often takes root in poor soil. Improve the soil and different things are more likely to grow.
Any English teacher would relish Laura Bates’s book Shakespeare Saved My Life (2013). Bates started a Shakespeare program in the solitary-confinement unit of Chicago’s Cook County Jail. She was faced with the improbable situation, at least initially, of talking to a class from a chair in a corridor such that she could not see her students and they could not see her. Her class comprised men who had done horrible things and who had had horrible things done to them. Shakespeare had a role in breaking this poisonous cycle. She began with Macbeth, which has all the violence this crew was accustomed to. But Macbeth turns the habit of violence to which all of us can become inured by constant exposure back into something strange, frightening and alien. The prisoners responded in a visceral way that you don’t get from students who basically want to know what is going to be on the exam. Bates’s men were going nowhere. That is why Shakespeare took them places.
Atwood’s Hag-Seed acknowledges Bates’s book. One of the things that makes Atwood a brilliant writer is that she is such a generous and creative reader. Hag-Seed is not the first time she played with the pieces on someone else’s chess board: The Penelopiad (2005) is a sassy retelling of the story not so much of Odysseus as of his wife, Penelope, who waited for him for twenty years on the rocky island of Ithaca while her bloke had adventures. Negotiating with the Dead (2002) is as fine a description of a writer’s inner life as you are likely to find, mainly because it is as much about reading as it is about writing. Atwood is grateful for a childhood that included the two blessings often visited upon future writers: ‘solitude and books’. She begins with a list of seventy-five separate reasons for writing that she has harvested from the insights of friends and other writers. A common theme is dealing with darkness:
Obstruction, obscurity, emptiness, disorientation, twilight, blackout, often combined with a struggle or path or journey—an inability to see one’s way forward, but a feeling there was a way forward, and that the act of going forward would eventually bring about the conditions for vision—these were the common elements in many descriptions of the process of writing.
Atwood realises that the writer’s business is often dirty. We need a lot more than a single lame curse to throw into the teeth of the gale.
In Hag-Seed, when Felix begins working on his production of The Tempest at Fletcher, he frustrates his cast by telling them that, if they want to swear, they can only use the curse words provided by the play itself. There is no shortage of these but they have to be found. Before long, the F-bomb is defused and replaced by expressions such as toads, beetles, bats light on you, filth as thou art, abhorred slave, all the infections that the sun sucks up, hag-seed and others beside. There is a moment towards the end when the cast is celebrating their triumph and eating food provided by Anne-Marie Greenland, who has played Miranda:
‘These are poxy good,’ says Leggs.
‘She is one whoreson of a cookie baker,’ says SnakeEye.
By this stage, you know that life has changed for these men and at least one aspect of their imprisonment is over.
If all the world is a stage, our role as the audience for the lives of countless others is to try to set them free from whatever chains or curse binds them. We have the magic words to do it.