Hag-Seed

I recently read Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood. It is one of a series of contemporary takes by established authors of Shakespearean plays proposed and organized by Hogarth. Hag-Seed is a re-telling of The Tempest.

For more than four hundred years, Shakespeare’s works have been performed, read, and loved throughout the world. They have been reinterpreted for each new generation, whether as teen films, musicals, science-fiction flicks, Japanese warrior tales, or literary transformations.

The Hogarth Press was founded by Virginia and Leonard Woolf in 1917 with a mission to publish the best new writing of the age. In 2012, Hogarth was launched in London and New York to continue the tradition. The Hogarth Shakespeare project sees Shakespeare’s works retold by acclaimed and bestselling novelists of today. The series launches in October 2015 and to date will be published in twenty countries.

There's no way at all that I feel in any way qualified to do a review of a Margaret Atwood novel. I only want to say that I loved Hag-Seed: it's a literary adventure with a play folded within a play within a play - so complex, so clever, so much fun. 

I would say that for a prospective reader it might helpful to have some knowledge of The Tempest. Since I last read The Tempest in high school more than 50 years ago the details were a bit sketchy in my mind and I was grateful to notice that MA gives a brief synopsis of the play at the back of the book. Now I have an urge to re-read the original. This might lead to an endless loop of reading/re-reading The Tempest and Hag-Seed. 😊