Brilliant Reimagining of Shakespeare's The Tempest: Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood

Contemporary novelists reimagine Shakespeare's plays in the Hogarth Shakespeare series. I have read Anne Tyler's Vinegar Girl (The Taming of the Shrew) and Jeanette Winterson's The Gap of Time (A Winter's Tale) but have not yet read Howard Jacobson's Shylock is my Name (The Merchant of Venice).

I was particularly eager to read Hag-Seed, Margaret Atwood's versions of The Tempest, because I'd read so many glowing reviews, and because I had read and enjoyed Atwood's last book The Heart Goes Last (my first time reading this author, which amazes me).

Hag-Seed is definitely my favorite in the series so far.

I won't concentrate on a plot synopsis since so many other reviewers have already done that. I'd rather address what aspects of the novel particularly impressed me.

I loved Hag-Seed's play within a play structure, so Shakespearean, where all the contemporary characters in the novel correspond to the original play and perform The Tempest while creating a live theater situation where the audience becomes a part of a play based on the Tempest.

I'll try to explain this again.

The protagonist, the brilliant and original artistic director Felix, was about to direct The Tempest when he was disposed from his job as artistic director by self-seeking men. Felix retreats to a primitive cabin in the middle of nowhere, his only companion the memory of his deceased daughter Miranda. After many years he takes a job under a false name and becomes Mr. Duke, literacy teacher in a local prison, teaching inmates Shakespeare through performance of the plays. When Felix learns his old enemies are now Ministers who want to end the prison literacy program he decides the time has come for him to take his revenge. The Ministers come to the prison to see a video of The Tempest performed by the inmates. But Felix and his prisoner actors plot a live theater experience that will bring his enemies under his power.

The intricate structure of the novel knocked my socks off. Additionally, as Felix teaches The Tempest to the prison inmates the reader is also educated about the play's themes and characters. And then at the end of the book the inmates offer reports on what happens to the characters after the events of the play. They offer original insights, such as Prospero's lack of oversight allowing Antonio to usurp him; a questioning of the strength or weakness of goodness; the theme of second chances; and theorizing that Prospero is Caliban's father. I also liked how the minor characters, the prisoners enrolled in Felix's course, have distinct personalities and back stories that relate to the roles they are assigned.

"The last three words in the play are 'set me free'," says Felix." Felix has identified nine prisons within the play, and so we understand how Atwood conceived of Hag-Seed.

Readers of this series don't have to be experts on Shakespeare's plays to enjoy the novels, although an understanding of the plays heightens the enjoyment. If you are rusty on the play, you can skip to the author's synopsis at the end and read it first.

I received a free e-book from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Hag-Seed
Margaret Atwood
Hogarth Shakespeare
Publication Oct. 11, 2016
$25 hard cover
ISBN:9780804141291

For an interesting follow-up to this book read Shakespeare Changed My Life by Dr. Laura Bates, telling how teaching the Bard to prisoners impacted their lives.

"Whatever is lost will be found": The Gap of Time by Jeanette Winterson

"The past is a grenade that explodes when thrown."

The Gap of Time: A Cover Version of William Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale by Jeanette Winterson was the first cover in the series by Hogarth Shakespeare. I previously read the Hogarth Shakespeare version of The Taming of the Shrew, Vinegar Girl by Anne Tyler, and you can read my review here. I have Hag Seed, the cover for The Tempest by Margaret Atwood, on my NetGalley shelf.

I admit the last time I read this Shakespeare play was in university. The course compared the early and last plays of three playrights; the Bard's The Winter's Tale and The Tempest were his last plays that we studied. The theme of the course was that the last works of the authors revisited early themes but with a comic or hopeful ending.

Winterson's novel places the story in modern London after the financial crisis which left the rich getting richer off of the misery of the rest of us. Leo Kaiser has wealth, a beautiful and talented wife MiMi, and a son Milo--plus MiMi is pregnant. Leo, like Othello, also is in a jealous rage, imagining that his old and close friend Xeno has been having an affair with MiMi; he believes that her baby is Xeno's. To complicate things, Leo and Xeno were sexual partners as teens and Xeno does love MiMi.

The early part of the novel is full of passion and rage. We learn about the youthful love shared between Leo and Xeno and how Leo 'accidently' nearly killed Xeno. We watch Leo rant and rave in jealous fits, spying on his wife. He tries to kill Xeno, driving him into 'exile'; then both loving and hating his wife, alienates MiMi and rejects their baby.

The baby, Perdita, is sent to her supposed father but a series of events brings her into the loving home of Shep and his son Clo, where she grows into a happy and beauiful girl. Age 17, Peridta is in love with Zel; they find themsleves on a journey of self-discovery that challanges everything they believed about their--and their parent's--identities.

I was uncomfortable with Leo's thought language of hate and his strange sexual arousal in the midst of jealous rage. At the same time I realize that the original plays by Shakespeare involve these extreme emotions and sick thinking. Leo and Xeno are damaged persons; "they had a life and they destroyed it. Their own and other people's."  Xeno fathers a child, 'a vanity project' his son labels it. Xeno retreats from the world in an alcoholic daze while creating a computer game, The Gap of Time, about the end of the world, where tragic and terrible things make possible sacrifice, struggle, and hope.

The teenage Perdita's story brings the novel scenes of family love, comedy and romance. In a game she says she would want Miranda from The Tempest as her dinner guest; later she assumes the name Miranda when meeting her father Leo for the first time. Winterson explains that in The Tempest, "Miranda...gets a father worth being born for."

At the end, the complicated realtionships are unraveled to the happiness of all.

The author plays with themes of time, 'The Fall' of man, angels, disguises, and shifting identities including sexual. The greatest threat comes from within ourselves. Time is reversible, she writes, time can be redeemed; that which is lost is found.

Winterson starts with a recap of  Shakespeare's play and wraps up with a commentary on the theme of the play: forgiveness.

For all my discomfort with Leo's actions, to the point that I considered not reading on, I finished the book in one evening's sitting and feel it growing on me. I may have to read it again.

I received a free book through Blogging for Books in exchange for a fair an unbiased review.

The Gap of Time
by Jeanette Winterson
Hogarth Shakespeare
Penguin Random House
$15 paperback
IBN: 978-0-8041-4137-6

Shakespeare Retold: Vinegar Girl by Anne Tyler

The Hogarth Press, founded by Virginia and Leonard Woolf in 1917, launched the Hogarth Shakespeare project last year. Acclaimed and best selling contemporary novelists are retelling the Bard's stories for modern audiences.

Anne Tyler's Vinegar Girl is based on The Taming of the Shrew. The play has been adapted into movies and the Broadway musical Kiss Me, Kate and is the inspiration behind 10 Things I Hate About You.

Vinegar Girl introduces us to the quirky Battista family. Kate is a college drop out working as a teacher's assistant and running the house for her eccentric scientist father and younger vacuous sister Bunny.

Kate's father has a problem. His valued assistant Pyotr Shcherbakov's O-1 visa is ending. Kate's dad has hatched a plan to match Kate and Pyotr, if not for love at least for a marriage of convenience. After all, at twenty-nine Kate has no other suitors. Kate is beautiful, but as her employer puts it, she is lacking tact, restraint, and diplomacy. Her directness delights her preschool charges, but gets her in trouble with their parents.

Pyotr is no charmer himself. He is attractive, but for all his research ability he is unwittingly disorganized and is oblivious about appearances. Pyotr seems cheerful, but he is lonely and homesick and his life is 'meager.'

Tyler's story is funny and her characters interesting. It is a wild ride to the altar, with stolen lab mice and fist fights. The book is light and fluffy, a nice beach read. The misogyny of the original story is gone. Tyler has given us a happy ending where two misfits allow each other space to be themselves.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Vinegar Girl
by Anne Tyler
Hogarth/Crown Publishing
publication date June 21, 2016
$25 hard cover
ISBN: 9780804141260

A Whimsical William Shakespeare

April 23 was the 400th anniversary of  the death of William Shakespeare. This quilt came to me and I rushed out to buy the fabric and supplies. I drew it out on freezer paper and cut out the shapes. I fused fabric for the face and pieced the doublet.

 His ruff print has love endearments.

I printed his sonnet 116 on fabric. And made 3-d folded flowers.

So much fun!

For Will

I woke up and saw William Shakespeare died on this day--April 23, 1616. A quilt image came to me and I was suddenly inspired...ran out to buy fabric...got started. Here's day one's work...

The Bard with a Thousand Faces

My dad did not understand why I had to read William Shakespeare. I was fourteen and reading Julius Caesar for English class. I was lucky; my teacher had a Master's degree in English and explained all the jokes and helped us understand what we were reading. Four years later he taught King Lear in World Literature class. I liked Shakespeare.

Shakespeare's words pervade our conversations and his stories are adapted into modern retellings. Consider King Lear, the inspiration for Akira Krosawa's film Ran and the novel A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley. Or The Taming of the Shrew, the basis for the musical Kiss Me Kate and the movies Ten Things I Hate About You and John Wayne's McLintock! Bernstein's musical West Side Story is an updated Romeo and Juliet. The Forbidden Planet sci-fi classic movie is based on The Tempest.

It is more amazing to know that Shakespeare has crossed bigger language barriers than archaic to modern English. World's Elsewhere: Journeys Around Shakespeare's Globe follows Andrew Dickson on five trips across world cultures to explore the legacy and reinvention of Shakespeare across cultures.

Dickson went to Danzig, where actors performed Shakespeare in the 16th c. We learn how German Romantic culture--and the Nazis-- claimed the Bard as their own, and how today German professional troupes perform more Shakespeare plays than in the UK.

Shakespeare's plays and the Bible were often the only books found in American pioneer homesteads. Traveling actors performed his plays in mining camps. Henry Folger amassed the largest collection of Shakespeare Folios and manuscripts in the world, more than in England.

Where ever Britain had colonies, they brought Shakespeare. His stories have been reinvented for 150 films in India!

My favorite journeys to read about were to South Africa and to China.

Dickson goes on a quest to learn about the Robben Island Bible, a cheap complete works that was passed among the prisoners of the island penal colony. Thirty-six inmates inscribed their signatures in the book, including Nelson Mandela. Mandela signed his name to the highlighted text from Julius Caesar "Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once..." Dickson also searches for Solomon Tshekisho Plaatj, a journalist and political activist who was the first to translate Shakespeare into a African language. Dickson's journey into contemporary South Africa while researching translators from the Boer War and Apartheid eras is a fascinating read.

Shakespeare in China may seem strange and doubtful. Translation issues alone are horrendous, plus the plays were repressed during the Cultural Revolution. Amazingly China is experiencing a surge of interest in the Bard, with so many traveling to Stratford-in-Avon in homage that the nearby airport has set up direct flights from Beijing. I was very taken by the story of Zhu Shiqiu whose life work was translating the plays. He lost his manuscripts three times, starting over until he had finished 31 at the time of his death.  Dickson discovers how the Cultural Revolution shut down Much Ado About Nothing; twenty years later the original actors brought back the play, same scripts, same costumes, same choreography.

Dickson struggles with questions of what Shakespeare means: a bridge of shared humanity, or a free-floating symbol whose ownership could be claimed?

Read Dickson's blog here: http://worldselsewhere.com

I received a free ARC through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

World's Elsewhere: Journeys Around Shakespeare's Globe
by Andrew Dickson
Henry Holt
$35 hard cover
Publication date: April 5, 2016
ISBN:9780805097344

How William Shakespeare Changed the Way you Talk

Shakespeare changed the way we speak. But do we know the origin of the phrases that have become household words?

It was with great excitement that I opened Jane Sutcliffe's book Will's Words about the phrases and sayings inherited from William Shakespeare. It is beautifully illustrated by John Shelley.

As I was reading the book written for Third and Fourth Grades I was wishing I could have read it to my son when he was that age. He would have loved the detailed illustrations showing London teeming with houses and people, the views of the Thames and London Bridge with boats of all sizes carrying people across the river, the aerial views of the city and The Globe, the crowds with their ruffed neckwear and doublets. There is a great cutaway of the Globe showing all the actors and stage hands putting on A Midsummer's Night's Dream, using trap doors and dangling a fairy over the stage.

And while my son studied the detailed illustrations I would have taught him about the importance of Shakespeare, an introduction to the Bard.

The book opens in 1606, a time when people sought an escape from their daily lives and the theaters offered plays six days a week. Except during an outbreak of the plague when they were shut down. We read about the theater goers, what the experience was like, and about the actors and the stories they told. We learn that Will wrote comedies that made the audience laugh themselves into stitches and tragedies about foul play that made their hair stand on end.

It ends with the publication of the 1616 first Folio, without which Shakespeare's words would have been lost.

Included is an author's note of how she came to write the book, a bibliography and a time line of Shakespeare's life.

The long and the short of it is that you'll get your money's worth out of this book!

NOTE: BOLD print words are included in the book Will's Words.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Will's Words How William Shakespeare Changed the Way You Talk
Jane Sutcliffe
Charlesbridge
Hardcover: 987-1-58089-638-2
E-book ISBN:
978-1-60734-855-9 EPUB
978-1-60734-856-6 PDF
Publication Date: March 22, 2016

An Interview With Jacopo della Quercia

A few weeks ago I gave a brief review of License to Quill, by Jacopo della Quercia. No, not the 15th c sculptor ; Jacopo is the pen name of a respected academic who is also a novelist and writes for Cracked.com.

Jacopo's previous book was The Great Abraham Lincoln Pocket Watch Conspiracy, a steampunk/alternate history/humorous adventure. License to Quill was a fun read following after reading Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606 by James Shapiro which explored how political events (like the Gunpowder Plot) impacted the Bard's plays King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra.

I was contacted by Jacopo and was able to interview him.

Interviewer: How did you choose your pen name?
Jacopo: Since I was doing political work around the time I started writing for the comedy website, I had no choice but to publish under a pen name. 'Jacopo della Quercia' is one many nicknames I've been called my entire adult life due to my real name, Giacomo, being a bit of a novelty to most people. I love my real name, but I've lived my whole life with people having a hard time pronouncing it, never mind spelling it. 'Jacopo' is my name's Latin equivalent, and I love writing under it if only because it serves as a standard to what my writing is frequently about: history, with a sense of humor to it.

[I sure understand the problem of people not knowing how to pronounce your name; I grew up a Gochenour after all!]

Interviewer: What was the inspiration behind License to Quill?
Jacopo: I was still writing my previous novel The Great Abraham Lincoln Pocket Watch Conspiracy when Skyfall hit theaters and bombarded me with videos and articles celebrating the 50th anniversary of the James Bond franchise. This evidently rubbed off on my as I decided what book to write next! Once I learned that Shakespeare wrote Macbeth around the same time that the Gunpowder Plot took place, I realized that I had all the characters and components I needed to write a James Bond-esque spy-thriller starring the most famous Englishman who ever lived!

Interviewer: Your writing is an unusual blend of genres. I would like to know more about your choice of style.
Jacopo: I try to keep  my novels faithful to their respective eras in history, no matter how outlandish it sounds. If there are science fiction aspects to my story, I consult experts, historians, and research everything I can on science from that particular moment in history. When writing dialogue I read contemporaneous works, including letters and diaries, and use an etymological dictionary to avoid anachronisms and make the language sound real. When creating my characters, I search for real figures from history to cast in my story, even if just for a cameo.

It's a wonderful experience because it lets you leap across genres, which I find somewhat amusing since, in my view of it, this is what history has always been like. World War II was an action movie, a science fiction movies, a comedy, a drama, a full-blown horror, and even a love story for tens of millions of people at the same time. Most writers choose to focus on only one aspect of history in their stories: the adventure, the drama, etc. I find it all fantastic, so I try to include all of it.

Interviewer: What writers influenced you? What writers do you enjoy now?
Jacopo: I think it all depends on whatever I'm writing at the moment. Alexandre Dumas, H. G. Wells, and Edgar Allan Poe influenced The Great Abraham Lincoln Pocket Watch Conspiracy a lot more than License to Quill, which was ultimately more influenced by the life and works of William Shakespeare than by Ian Fleming's James Bond novels. I imagine I'll go on a Jane Austen binge at some point and write a book starring her. The same could go for Charles Dickens or Mark Twain, or maybe Dante, whom I am probably most indebted to as a writer.

[Austen? Dickens? Twain? I'm all for that! But imagine what he could do with Dante!]

Interviewer: What would you like readers to know about your book?
Jacopo: The first thing I would like my readers to know is "thank you." Thank you for taking this moment to give my novel a chance. It's because of readers like you that I can write books designed to make people of all interests and backgrounds more excited about history. License to Quill is a James Bond-esque spy thriller starring William Shakespeare and Guy Fawkes during the Gunpowder Plot. It is the product of years of research and a lifetime of love for William Shakespeare and the Renaissance. It is a thriller, an adventure, a mystery, and much more. I like my stories filled with surprises and License to Quill is no exception! I hope you like it!

Jacopo della Quercia

I thank Jacopo for taking the time to talk to us!

Read my review of License to Quill here. It is available from St. Martin's Griffin.