Summary
Estelle gets in touch with Felix and requests to have lunch with him. At lunch, Estelle tells Felix that Sal O'Nally and Tony Price -- the latter of whom has recently been appointed Minister of Justice -- are coming to Fletcher Correctional to see one of Felix's productions. It is here that Felix decides that he will put on The Tempest, defending his choice to Estelle by asserting that the play is about prisons. When the three-month semester begins, Felix enters Fletcher and speaks briefly with the security guards, Madison and Dylan, about The Tempest. The men are barely familiar with it, but they are interested to see what kind of performance Felix is planning. Felix enters the room where he meets his students and takes inventory of what he has to work with, thinking to himself, "This is the extent of it...my island domain. My place of exile. My penance. My theatre" (82).
After introductions between him and his students, Felix pitches the performance to the inmates and announces that they are doing The Tempest. He briefly describes some of the characters, noting that he will play Prospero, the patriarchal magician who controls the island. The inmates are confused as to why they are not performing something with more action and violence, like one of Shakespeare's tragedies. None of the men want to play Miranda, Prospero's daughter, or Ariel, Prospero's servant-spirit who enacts much of Prospero's "magic." Felix announces that nobody will have to play Miranda as he is bringing in an actress from outside of Fletcher. He then instructs the men to read through the play and find all of the swear words and insults in Shakespeare's original script. This is the only cursing the men will be allowed to do for the remainder of the semester. One of the terms, "Hag-Seed," is used to describe Caliban, Prospero's servant and native of the island, who is often treated as lesser and savage.
Felix has lunch with Anne-Marie Greenland, an actress whom he had originally wanted to play Miranda twelve years ago in his Makeshiweg production of The Tempest. She is a slender dancer with a tough personality, and after initial hesitation, she agrees to the role. Back at Fletcher, Felix engages the players in a discussion about Ariel, encouraging them to think of him as something other than a spirit or fairy. Together, the men decide that Ariel should be portrayed as an alien-like figure, and suddenly multiple people want to play him. Felix has the men rank their preferred characters before making the ultimate casting decisions. After seeing that nobody wants to play Caliban, Felix launches another discussion about his character and the men conclude that there are multiple intriguing layers to the role. The final assignment before production begins on The Tempest is for the inmates to count the number of prisons in the play.
Analysis
The second part of the novel is dedicated largely to the work of the Fletcher Correctional Facility players and Felix's role as their program director. Through the many conversations and discussions Felix has with his group of students, Atwood essentially performs a literary analysis of The Tempest for the reader and further emphasizes how so many aspects of The Tempest (and the novel at hand) may raise ambivalent or even confused reactions. The players, for example, are initially averse to playing Ariel, as he is presented in the play as a "sprite" or "fairy," and the feminine connotations of such a role make the men uncomfortable. However, after class discussion in which Felix encourages his students to consider Ariel's function in the play, rather than simply his title, the men are able to begin thinking more seriously about the implications of Ariel as a catalyst, as well as his servant-master relationship to Prospero. As such, these discussions staged between Felix and his students are actually small dramatizations of literary analysis in which readers are encouraged to think beyond a superficial reading of the text.
This section of the book also draws parallels between the inmates at Fletcher Correctional Facility and the multiple "imprisoned" characters in Shakespeare's The Tempest, specifically Ariel and Caliban. Felix tells his students that there are multiple forms of prison in the play, and one of the prisons the players gravitate most toward is the relationship between Prospero and Caliban. Again, the class discussions represent a literary analysis of Caliban that reveals the more ambivalent reading of his character: just as the inmates have all been imprisoned because of crimes they have committed, so has Caliban been rejected by Prospero for his attempted rape of Miranda. However, the novel and the play both raise the question of how to address such criminal behavior. Is the characterization of Caliban as a savage in The Tempest warranted or not? Likewise, what are we to think about prisoners in the federal prison system? Does one crime define them as criminals for the rest of their lives? Through the shared analysis of Caliban's character, the students are able to present these ideological questions -- central to both The Tempest and Hag-Seed -- to the reader in a contemporary context.
