Felix Philips is stuck, his wounds green. He is unable to move past the death of his beloved only daughter, Miranda, at the age of three. Nor can he put to rest the humiliation of being cast out from his directorial post at a prestigious theatre festival, while on the cusp of bringing to fruition a promising production of The Tempest, through which Miranda will be artistically revived in the flesh. Off-stage, alone, mentally imprisoned in a no-man’s land, Felix plots his revenge against Tony and Sal in a bid to right past wrongs and to bring a measure of closure.
 

In adapting The Tempest into a novel, Hag-Seed, Margaret Atwood took a cue from Sir Francis Bacon, presenting a quote of his as an epigraph for her novel, “This is certain, that a man that studieth revenge, keeps his own wounds green, which otherwise would heal, and do well” (Atwood 13). Foregrounding the theme of revenge from the outset instills a meta self-awareness in the narrative, adding a prescient echo to the Bard’s magical revenge plot which simultaneously warns against the pursuit of retribution. Throughout Hag-Seed, Atwood conjures up several tricks like this to reprocess the notion that enacting revenge can bring closure, delaying the moment of gratification Felix anticipates with singular focus by ever stretching, stalling, and splintering the linear progression of time via special formatting, multiple endings, and a dynamic meta-drama between the characters and their Shakespearean shadows. In dissolving the simplistic cause-and-effect chains that justify revenge, the novel also hints at the vanity of an attempt to fixate a fetishized “perfect” past in the inherently temporal medium of theatre.

 

The peculiar formatting choice of the time stamp sets the stage for a push-and-pull between the narrative and Felix for control over time. Beginning in the Prologue with “Wednesday, March 13, 2013,” the time stamps come to signal a clear, linear chronology stretching forcefully into the future, against which Felix must fight to rewrite the past (16). They set a rhythm for the narrative outside of Felix’s control. The first section of the novel lingers on one date, January 13, 2013, from the start of “Seashore” to the end of “Felix Addresses the Players,” for a staggering thirteen chapters before allowing Felix to move on (22, 106). The unchanging time stamp entraps Felix in a general state of stagnation, as he broods over the causes for his discontent, reviewing the injuries to keep them inadvertently fresh. He sharpens his purpose to stage his Tempest and release “his Miranda ... from her glass coffin,” yet is prevented from executing the plan (55). Hence, the narrative uses the time stamp to construct a prison for Felix, fixing him in an extended present, unable to act on his impulse for revenge.

 

Meanwhile, the narrative affords agency to Felix by aligning with his point of view and perception of time. In Chapter 13, the narrative slows down when moving from dialogue between players in the room to Felix’s interior monologue about the inmates’ aversion to being asked to portray Miranda, an example of free indirect discourse (103). For the most part, the reader views the world of the novel from Felix’s point of view, treading the same ground with him, wallowing in a boundless grief tinged with resentment. While the time stamp in the Prologue establishes the linear chronology, the events of the chapter disrupt it, previewing Felix constructing a perfect revival of The Tempest two months later. This predicts a future in which Felix emerges victorious in his fight to exact revenge on his perceived enemies and to resurrect a theatrical past “he could never better” (311). Thus, the narrative enacts an interplay between a pre-determined format and a protagonist who operates with a level of lliberty to push back against the constraining format and make change.
 

The novel’s pairing of its characters with their Shakespearean counterparts sets in motion a similar struggle between stasis and change. Felix is obsessed with his parallel to Prospero to a fault. That he keeps Prospero’s costume from twelve years ago indicates his ongoing identification with the character. He views his entire life as a mirror of The Tempest, noting that the daughter of his landlady is too “podgy, stubby” a child to be imagined as “the sylph-like Miranda,” when she is merely someone who happens to cross his path (51). Despite Felix’s insistence on seeing his life as an extension of The Tempest, he cannot control how everyone else fits in this picture. Anne-Marie’s growth into a ballerina with a sailor’s mouth defies Felix’s prior vision of her younger self as the perfect embodiment of Miranda, whereas the ghost Miranda grows up and gains more agency, eventually adopting the role of Ariel. Yet Felix persists headstrong. Hence, the narrative suggests that Felix’s fetishization of theatre, at the expense of real life, constitutes a second prison more potent than the time stamps.
 

Ironically, Felix’s preoccupation with reviving an idealized past leads him to overlook a basic fact about his medium. Theatre is a poor preserver of a perfect, unchanging past, given the medium’s ephemeral nature. In The Empty Space, a seminal work of theatre theory, director Peter Brook writes,

Unlike a book, the theatre has one special characteristic. It is always possible to start again. In life this is a myth; we ourselves can never go back on anything. New leaves never turn, clocks never go back, we can never have a second chance. In the theatre the slate is wiped clean all the time. (Brook 174–75)

In other words, the medium of theatre is uniquely rooted in the present, generating new meaning with each performance. Nothing ever stands still in the theatre. At one point, Felix himself appears aware of this. In his first class with The Fletcher Correctional Players, Felix notes that their criminal pasts do not concern him, stating that “the past is prologue, which means we begin counting time and accomplishments right here, right now” (Atwood 16). Felix reinterprets the direct quote from The Tempest not only to hint at rehabilitation for the inmates, but also to designate theatre as an art form bristling with possibilities for change.
 

It is in lucid moments like these that Felix approaches a level of self-awareness that complicates his relationship to Prospero. At times, he doubts the suitability of Prospero as an avatar, noting the pairs of contradictory qualities the character is written to embody simultaneously: “entitled aristocrat, modest hermit? Wise old mage, revengeful old poop? Irritable and unreasonable, kindly and caring? Sadistic, forgiving? Too suspicious, too trusting?” (203). This self-doubt dampens Felix’s resolution, complicating what otherwise would be a straightforward revenge plot. In the final analysis, Felix appears clear-eyed about the mechanics of The Tempest as “a play about a man producing a play” (305). He recognizes that unless forgiven, “he’ll be forced to re-enact his feelings of revenge, over and over” in a hellish manner (306). Therefore, Felix engages reflectively with his shadow in Prospero, informed without being determined by the latter’s choices, thereby inching towards transcending the cycle of vengeance.

 

But if Felix is essentially aware of the pitfalls of revenge, why does he still feel the need to
follow through? Felix thinks he is Prospero because the novel instructs him to. The novel’s structure as a self-aware reconstruction of The Tempest refrains from directly preaching the cliché, didactic conclusion that one should never seek revenge. Rather, the novel starts from a sympathetic attitude towards Felix’s grief and anger, giving him his win in the form of a successful revival of The Tempest. Yet, does this ending suggest that enacting revenge has brought into being the perfect past that Felix longs for? Poignantly, the multiplicity of endings constructed by Atwood denies the reader this clarity. If the moment the curtains close on the play-within-a-novel marks the end, there seems to be no closure there. Instead, Felix hears a prompting call from Miranda to do the rarer thing and choose forgiveness (68). If the post-performance analysis among the Players marks the end, the section features multiple imaginative extensions of the major characters’ lives that venture far beyond the scope of the text itself. Still, there is the Epilogue, in which Felix has a change of heart and realizes that “[t]he endgame of his obsession wasn’t to bring his Miranda back to life,” and decides to set his memory of Miranda free with the direct quote, “[t]o the elements be free” (314, 315). If this marks the end, what this “endgame” entails is left open to interpretation, ready to be discussed unendingly. In any case, there is enough material at each point for the narrative to stop, yet it continues. By taking the reader on a circuitous journey through splintered endings which do not resolve, the narrative rejects revenge
as a definitive means to closure in a way that enhances the impact of this message.
 

In the appendix, Atwood reproduces a summary of Shakespeare’s Tempest in compressed prose, once again drawing attention to its age-old source text. Much as Felix does with his staging of the play in the novel, Hag-Seed positions itself as a faithful telling of The Tempest in the present by deliberately mirroring the play’s arc, down to re-contextualizing direct quotes. However, the combined effects of the novel’s various disruptions to the linear chronology, Felix’s own self-awareness about his divided identity, and the multiple endings prevent the tale of revenge from being read straightforwardly, in a tone of uncritical condonation. Additionally, the novel is self-aware of its own trajectory as an entity in time. Upon the novel’s publication in 2016, the timestamps would have already appeared as fragments from a receding past, its gulf with the present moment widening slowly but surely at the turning of the calendar. Atwood’s Hag-Seed is a deliberately imperfect re-staging of The Tempest that inevitably ages, yet with each revisitation, still it bears the potential to be extended, to be morphed, to be temporarily resprouted as evergreen until the end of time.