Margaret Atwood is one of the acclaimed novelists taking part in the Hogarth Shakespeare project, a series of books that will see many of Shakespeare’s works re-imagined and retold. This week, Blackwell’s Bookshop Edinburgh welcomed Atwood to the King’s Theatre to discuss Hag-seed, her recently-published take on The Tempest. Chaired by freelance critic and literary editor of Scotland on Sunday, Stuart Kelly, the evening followed the format of a typical book festival event, with Kelly hosting 45 minutes of questions and stimulating conversation, before opening up the discussion to take questions from the audience.
Kelly began by asking about the brief and whether The Tempest had been the publisher’s or Atwood’s choice. Apparently the only instruction was to create a modern novel based on one of Shakespeare’s plays. Atwood had immediately proposed The Tempest and claimed she would not, or could not, have chosen any other. The obvious next question was, ‘Why?’, to which Atwood playfully and enigmatically responded that there are ‘many holes in the plot’ – or ‘open doors’ that she wished to go through and explore.
Atwood places her version in a modern-day prison, centred around an ex-theatre director, Felix – her Prospero – who gets the inmates to perform The Tempest as part of a Literacy Through Literature programme. This allows her to explore the theme of imprisonment that takes various forms throughout the play, and her novel, and to delve into the murky waters of revenge. Intrigued by the epilogue in which Prospero steps out of the play to announce that he has thrown away his magic powers and now seeks forgiveness and to be set free, Atwood asked herself the question, ‘Prospero wants to be set free from what? What has Prospero done? What is he guilty of?’
Her mind full of such questions, Atwood’s prisoners are asked to write essays imagining what happens to their characters after the play finishes. Kelly and Atwood, during their on-stage discussion, agree that one reason why Shakespeare is so often re-imagined is due to the open-ended nature of his work that allows for endless re-interpretations. Shakespeare, they contend, is ‘not neat’, which is why the French hated him, and Atwood jokes that it may be that he just didn’t have a continuity editor - we will never know.
Questions from the audience inevitably returned Atwood to some of her earlier novels, but ended with a question that returned us to what had been Kelly’s first question of the evening - which play she would have chosen if she had been prevented from choosing The Tempest. In her usual style, Atwood responded with a seemingly tangential anecdotal quote, about someone once saying that when they eat cookies that want to eat too many and if they can’t have too many then they don’t want any.
This, apparently, is how she feels about re-writing The Tempest – she would probably have chosen to write nothing if she couldn’t write that. She is, however, looking forward to seeing what other writers do with the other plays and if you’re interested in seeing how Atwood has resolved some of Shakespeare’s ‘holes’ as well as getting some answers to some of the questions se has raised, Hag-seed is available now from all good bookshops – and especially at Blackwell’s Bookshop Edinburgh!