Hag-Seed: William Shakespeare's The Tempest Retold

Part 1, Prologue-Chapter 9

Reading Check

1. Chapter 1 takes place two months before the Prologue. (Prologue and Chapter 1)

2. Tony (Chapter 3)

3. Children’s books (Chapter 6)

4. The Fletcher County Correctional Institute (Chapter 8)

Short Answer

1. Felix’s wife acquired a staph infection after giving birth to Miranda and died shortly thereafter. (Chapter 2)

2. He asks the landlady to keep his presence there a secret and even lives under a pseudonym, “Mr. Duke.” (Chapter 5)

3. He begins to vividly imagine Miranda still alive, hallucinating that she is growing up with him in his isolated shack. (Chapter 7)

4. Felix finds his old magician’s costume. He decides that the time is not yet right for him to put it back on—this alerts the reader that at some future point he likely will put it back on, and that this moment will be a significant turning point for Felix. (Chapter 9)

Part 2, Chapters 10-19

Reading Check

1. Cigarettes (Chapter 13)

2. Prospero (Chapter 15)

3. Chess (Chapter 17)

4. Caliban (Chapter 19)

Short Answer

1. He tells Estelle that the play will benefit the prisoners because it is about imprisonment. (Chapter 10)

2. They think that the prisoners really need therapy and practical life skills, not Shakespeare, and that Felix is using the prisoners as a kind of experiment. (Chapter 12)

3. The prisoners feel that Ariel’s character is insufficiently masculine and that playing the role will harm their credibility in the prison. Felix convinces them to see Ariel as a sort of alien assistant to Prospero rather than as a magical sprite. (Chapter 16)

4. Felix tells the prisoners that the island is like a mirror in which each person can see their truest self. He later compares the island to a theater. (Chapter 18)

Part 3, Chapters 20-29

Reading Check

1. After their performance (Chapter 21)

2. Early parole (Chapter 24)

3. Toronto (Chapter 26)

4. Puts on the magician’s costume (Chapters 9 and 29)

Short Answer

1. He struggles with the idea of Miranda as a young woman simply trying to get away from her deranged father, and he concludes that the play might not be “trustworthy.” (Chapter 23)

2. SnakeEye proposes that the prisoners include photos of their children in the scene where Prospero describes Miranda as an angel watching over him; he then asks Felix whether he wants to include a photo of his own daughter. (Chapter 25)

3. She inspects the props and costumes and demands to play Miranda in the upcoming production. (Chapter 27)

4. Leggs performs a rap that he and Anne-Marie wrote. In it, he refers to Caliban by the derogatory name that Prospero uses for him: “Hag-Seed.” (Chapter 28)

Part 4, Chapters 30-39

Reading Check

1. Ketamine (Chapter 32)

2. Ferdinand (Chapter 35)

3. Lonnie (Chapter 37)

4. Clowns (Chapter 38)

Short Answer

1. Felix is actually concerned that the digital feed will pick up the voice of his daughter; this indicates that he fully believes in her hallucinated presence. (Chapter 30)

2. Tony is only coming to the performance in order to reveal what a waste of resources it is. He plans to pull the program’s funding afterward. (Chapter 31)

3. Tony proposes that he and Sebert kill Sal and Lonnie and blame the deaths on the prison riot. (Chapter 36)

4. He demands reinstatement as the artistic director, an early parole for 8Handz, continued funding for the prison literacy program, and Tony’s resignation. (Chapter 39)

Part 5, Chapter 40-Epilogue

Reading Check

1. A cast party (Chapter 40)

2. Miranda (Chapter 43)

3. Moral purity (Chapter 44)

4. Caliban (Chapter 46)

Short Answer

1. He notes that Ariel has the decency to feel sorry for the people he harms at Prospero’s direction, but that these same people would not extend the same empathy to Ariel. (Chapter 41)

2. He imagines that on the return voyage to Italy, Antonio will rape Miranda and kill her along with all of the other major characters. (Chapter 42)

3. He imagines that Caliban is revealed to be Prospero’s son and that Prospero takes him back to Italy and helps him pursue his dream of becoming a musician. (Chapter 45)

4. Felix hires Freddie and Anne-Marie to perform most of the work of the artistic director position, deciding that he will function only in an honorary capacity as director. He also realizes that he has, figuratively, kept his daughter trapped at his side and that it is time to let her go. (Epilogue)