Hag-Seed: William Shakespeare's The Tempest Retold

Use this activity to engage all types of learners while requiring that they refer to and incorporate details from the text over the course of the activity.

“Keep the Conversation Going”

In this activity, students will demonstrate their understanding of the novel’s intertextuality by using quotes from the novel to create an original example of intertextuality.

The Tempest is not the only text that Atwood refers to in Hag-Seed. For instance, she offers epigraphs from several famous works. In this activity, you will create your own intertextual work using these epigraphs and quotes from Atwood’s novel.

Gather Your Quotes

• Write down the three epigraphs used in Hag-Seed.
• Choose three quotes from Hag-Seed that relate to the epigraphs in some way—they express similar thoughts, share a thematic connection, create a contrast with the epigraphs, etc.
• Consider how you can arrange these six quotes and connect them with ideas of your own to form a cohesive message.

Create a New “Text”

• Your end product can be any genre, medium, or format you like, as long as it successfully communicates a message. Some possibilities are a dramatic scene, a vignette, a series of drawings, a poem, or a comic.
• Your end product must use the quoted material from Hag-Seed verbatim.
• Your end product must also include your own creative input—text you have written, drawings you have created, etc.

Teaching Suggestion: You might wish to provide some guidance about appropriate project formats for the time your students have available to work on this activity, and about how you expect quoted material to be treated within the project. This activity is ideal for presentations or sharing in small groups; you can create audience accountability and a chance for reflection by asking students to write down their guesses about the message being conveyed by the projects presented to them.

Differentiation Suggestion: This activity provides enough student choice that learners of various types should be able to accomplish it without much accommodation. Students who struggle with abstract thinking, however, may have difficulty understanding how to create a new text from Atwood’s material. You may wish to prepare a sample project in advance and then model your thinking about how to translate Atwood’s material into a new context.