Novel: Hag-Seed

Premise
Hag-Seed reimagines Shakespeare's The Tempest as a sharply contemporary tale about art, exile and revenge. Margaret Atwood centers the story on Felix, a once-celebrated theatre director who is betrayed and ousted from his post. Years later, operating at the margins of the theatrical world, Felix plots a theatrical and psychological comeback by mounting a prison production of The Tempest with incarcerated actors.
Atwood frames the retelling as both a loving homage to Shakespeare and a modern parable about imprisonment , literal and emotional. The novel riffs on Prospero's tactics of control and illusion while showing how theatre can serve as both a weapon and a means of repair.

Plot
Felix is driven out of his job by a cabal of colleagues and left to nurse his humiliation. Consumed by a desire for retribution and buoyed by his intimate knowledge of The Tempest, he reinvents himself by taking a position running a prison arts program. There he carefully reconstructs Prospero's manipulative ingenuity, training prisoners to perform the play and engineering circumstances that will bring his enemies into the orbit of his staged world.
The prison production becomes an elaborate mechanism of psychological theatre. Felix uses costumes, props and staging techniques to blur the lines between rehearsal, performance and revenge, orchestrating encounters that force his adversaries to confront their past actions. As the inmates take on roles borrowed from The Tempest, their own stories of guilt, loss and ambition surface, and Felix finds that the play has power beyond his initial plan. The climax resolves both theatrical and personal reckonings, and the ending balances a measure of vengeance with the possibility of mercy and transformation.

Characters
Felix is the central presence: proud, ingenious and wounded, his identity bound up with theatrical control. His grief and obsession transform him into a Prospero-like figure, equal parts puppeteer and educator. The inmates who join the production are drawn with sympathy and individuality; their performances and backstories reveal how incarceration, talent and the need for redemption intersect.
The ensemble of antagonists who betrayed Felix are rendered as recognizable modern types rather than Shakespearean archetypes, their motivations rooted in professional ambition and small betrayals. Miranda's name and legacy echo through the novel as a connective thread to Shakespeare's original, while the inmates' gradual humanization complicates Felix's single-minded quest.

Themes
Hag-Seed interrogates the ethics of revenge and the transformative potential of art. Theatre is shown as a double-edged instrument that can humiliate and heal, manipulate and redeem. The novel explores the porous boundary between performance and reality: staging becomes a way to rehearse freedom, to reimagine identity, and to enact justice that the legal system fails to deliver.
Atwood also examines incarceration metaphorically: characters are trapped by grief, ambition, memory and reputation as much as by bars. Forgiveness and mercy emerge as difficult, deliberate choices rather than tidy resolutions, and the narrative asks whether reparation can ever fully atone for harm or whether it must settle for partial consolation.

Style and significance
Atwood's prose is witty, economical and richly intertextual. Playful echoes of Shakespeare run through chapter headings, dialogue and stagecraft, while contemporary idiom and dark humor ground the book in the present. The structure , a novel that contains a play production , invites readers to consider how storytelling itself stages identity and power.
As part of the Hogarth Shakespeare series, Hag-Seed succeeds as an accessible retelling that retains the thematic core of The Tempest while making its conflicts urgently modern. It offers both a celebration of theatrical imagination and a thoughtful meditation on the limits and possibilities of revenge, ultimately suggesting that creativity and compassion can be routes out of bondage.