Hag-Seed

by Margaret Atwood

  As befits modesty, Miranda is never present when he's performing this ritual. Where does she go? Somewhere else. Wise lass. Nothing would diminish an adolescent girl's respect for her sagacious male parent more than a glimpse of his spindle shanks and puckering, wizened flesh.

  How exactly did Prospero and Miranda bathe themselves when on the island? Felix ponders this question while gingerly soaping himself under the arms. Did they have a tub? Unlikely. Perhaps there was a waterfall. But every time she used it, wouldn't Miranda have risked predation by the lustful Caliban? Certainly; but Prospero must have penned him up in his rocky cell at such moments.

  All very well, but what about Prospero himself? In order to keep his charms going, didn't he need to be wearing his magic garment? Didn't he require his books, his staff? He wouldn't have been able to keep his magic garment on while having a shower in the waterfall. So maybe he didn't take showers. The old boy must have been fairly rank, after twelve years with no showers.

  But he's forgetting: Ariel would have stood guard. Ariel in harpy wings, and Prospero's praetorian guard of obedient goblins. "Bath attendant" wasn't a function mentioned for Ariel in the text, but it must have been understood.

  It's an omission in much literature of the theatre, Felix decides: nobody bathes or even thinks about it, nobody eats, nobody defecates. Except in Beckett, of course. You can always count on Beckett. Radishes, carrots, pissing, stinky feet: it's all there, the entire human corpus at its most mundane and abject level.

  He rises up from the tin tub, feet squeaking, and steps out onto the cold floorboards, then briskly towels himself off. Into his flannel nightshirt. Fill the hot water bottle. Teeth in a glass of water, effervescent tablet sizzling. Vitamin pill, cocoa. He can't face the outhouse in a blizzard, so he pees into a Mason jar he keeps for the purpose and pours the effluent down the sink. Prospero never had to deal with snow: he wouldn't have needed a jar.

  And so to bed.

  Once he's tucked in and turned out the light, Miranda coalesces in the darkness. "Goodnight," he says to her. Does she brush the air above his forehead lightly with her hand? Surely she does.

  --

  Wednesday morning is bright and clear. After a boiled egg for breakfast Felix drives past the snow-covered fields and glittering trees, then up the hill to Fletcher Correctional, whistling a silent tune. Ban, ban, Ca-caliban. An excellent moment for a musical number, that scene. He'll tell them the Caliban chant is an early example of rap, which it kind of is.

  "We have a problem," he begins after positioning himself beside the whiteboard. "Fifteen of you want to play Caliban. We need to talk about it." He picks up his marker. "What kind of being is Caliban?" Blank stares.

  "So," he tries again, "we agreed that Ariel wasn't human--that he's some kind of an alien. What about Caliban? He had a human mother, we know that anyway. So--human or not human?"

  "Yeah, human," says HotWire.

  "Too human," says WonderBoy, looking around for support. "How he wanted to jump into Miranda." Some rueful laughter, murmurs of "Yeah."

  Getting somewhere, thinks Felix. "Off the top of your head," he says, "what's the one word that best describes Caliban?"

  "Monster," says PPod. "Lots of them call him a monster."

  "Evil." "Stupid." "Ugly." "Fish. They say he stinks like a fish."

  "Sort of a cannibal. Like, a savage."

  "Earth," says Phil the Pill.

  "Slave," says Red Coyote. "Poisonous slave," he adds.

  "Hag-seed," says 8Handz, the hacker from the dark side. "That's the best one."

  Felix writes down the words in sequence. "Not a very nice guy," he says. "So why do you want to play him?"

  Grins. "He's poxy awesome."

  "We get him."

  "Everyone kicks him around but he don't let it break him, he says what he thinks." This from Leggs.

  "He's mean," says Shiv. "Wicked mean! Everyone who's dissing him, he wants to get them back!"

  Felix draws a line under the words. "We hear a lot of bad words about him from other people," he says. "But nobody's just the sum total of what other people say. Everyone has another layer." Nods: they're buying it. "What about these other layers?" He answers himself, as often:

  "First, He loves music. He can sing and dance." MUSICAL, he writes. "So he's sort of like Ariel."

  "Not in a fairy way, though," says Shiv. "No cowslips."

  Felix ignores this. "He knows the island--where to find everything on it, such as what to eat." LOCAL KNOWLEDGE, he writes. "He has the most poetic speech about the island in the whole play--the one about his beautiful dreams." ROMANTIC, he writes. "And he feels that his birthright--the island--has been stolen from him by Prospero, and he wants it restored." VENGEFUL, he writes.

  "In a way he has a case," says SnakeEye.

  "So he's like Prospero," says 8Handz. "He's full of these ideas to get vengeance. And he wants to be King Shit."

  "Point off, you said shit," says WonderBoy.

  "Wasn't a curse," says 8Handz. "Just a name."

  "What I'm trying to tell you," says Felix, "is that Caliban is a difficult part. You need to think about it. Playing him is hard work." He pauses to let this sink in. There are some sub-vocal noises. Are some of the fifteen Caliban aspirants reconsidering? Possibly.

  "And yes, he's partly like Prospero," Felix continues. "But Prospero never wants to be king of the island and set up a colony on it. On the contrary, he wishes to see the last of it. But Caliban thinks he should be its king, and he wants to populate it with replicas of himself, which he'd like to do by raping Miranda. When he can't have that, he throws in his lot with Stephano and Trinculo and urges them to murder Prospero."

  "Not a bad plan," says Leggs. Murmurs of agreement.

  "Okay, you don't like Prospero," says Felix. "And there are some reasons why you wouldn't. We'll talk about that later. Meanwhile, here's your assignment. On our first day, I said that one of the keynotes of this play is Prisons." PRISONS, he writes at the top of the whiteboard. "Now, I want you to go through and find all the prisons, including those in the backstory--the part that happened before the play begins.

  "What kinds of prisons are they? Who's been put in each of them? And who's the jailer--who's put them in, who's keeping them there?" PRISONER. PRISON. JAILER, he writes. "I found at least seven prisons. Maybe you can find more." There are actually nine, but let them outdo him.

  "If it's the same actual place, such as the island, but a different part of it, does that make two prisons?" says Bent Pencil. "Or one?"

  "Let's call them unique incarceration events," says Felix.

  "Unique incarceration events?" says Leggs. "Yeah, when I get out, I'm gonna say, I had a four-year poxy, suckin' unique incarceration event." Laughter from the company.

  "Least it's not a unique dead event," says PPod.

  "Unique smash your face in event."

  "Unique totally wasted event."

  "Right," says Felix. "You know what I mean." They call him out when he talks too much like a social worker.

  "What exactly counts?" says 8Handz. "Like, that pine tree Ariel was stuck in?"

  "Let's say a prison is any place or situation that you've been put in against your will, that you don't want to be in, and that you can't get out of," says Felix. "So, yes: the pine tree counts."

  "Whoreson!" says HotWire. "Doing solitary in a pine!"

  "Whoreson awesome," says 8Handz.

  "The oak would be worse," says Red Coyote. "Oak's harder wood."

  "Is there a score for the most prisons? We get cigarettes for this?" says Leggs.

  In block letters, red, Felix covers his whiteboard with the class findings. "You've done well," he says. "You've spotted eight..." He pauses. "Eight unique incarceration events." Let them swallow the phrase this time, he thinks, and they do: there are no scoffing comments. "There's a ninth prison, however." Puzzled looks. Skepticism from 8Handz: "No plaguey way!"

  Felix waits. Watches them counting, pondering.


  "You gonna tell us?" PPod asks at last.

  "After we've done the play," says Felix. "Once our revels are ended. Unless, of course, someone guesses it before then." They won't guess, is his bet, but he's been wrong before. "Now, let's look at the jailers. Three characters are imprisoned by someone who isn't Prospero: Sycorax, on the island, by the officials of Algiers; Ariel, in a pine, by Sycorax, and Prospero himself, by Antonio, with an assist from Alonso, first in the leaky boat and then on the island itself. Four characters if you count Miranda, but she was only three years old when she landed so she grows up on the island without feeling imprisoned by it. Then, seven individuals are imprisoned in events in which the jailer is Prospero. He would seem to be the top jailer in this play."

  "Plus he's a slave-driver," says Red Coyote.

  "Not just with Caliban, he's got his foot on Ariel too," says 8Handz. "He threatens him with that oak tree. Permanent solitary. It's inhuman."

  "Plus he's a land stealer," adds Red Coyote. "Suckin' old white guy. He should be called Prospero Corp. Next thing he'll discover oil on it, develop it, machine-gun everyone to keep them off it."

  "You're such a poxy communist," says SnakeEye.

  "Shove it, freckled whelp," says Red Coyote.

  "No whoreson dissin', we're a team," says Leggs.

  Calm is called for. "I know you hold those things against Prospero," says Felix. "Especially his treatment of Caliban." He looks around the room: frowns. Jaw-tightenings. Definite hostility toward Prospero. "But what are his options?"

  "Options!" says Shiv. "We don't give a--we don't give an earth about his suckin' options!"

  "Watch it with the earth," says Red Coyote. "Just sayin'."

  "Not everything's about you," says Shiv.

  "Give Prospero a chance. Let's hear about the options," says Bent Pencil mildly. He likes to play the man of reason.

  "I'll spell it out," says Felix. "Suppose the ship with King Alonso and Antonio and Ferdinand and Gonzalo had never showed up. It was blind luck that it sailed near the island on the way back from the wedding of Alonso's daughter. Or, in the language of Prospero, it was the action of an auspicious star and Lady Fortune. But suppose that ship never arrived. There was Prospero, trapped on the island, with a young daughter and a young, stronger male who tries to have sex with her against her will. Even though Prospero has been kind to the wild-child Caliban, the grown-up Caliban turns against him.

  "Nobody has a gun. Nobody has a sword. In a match of strength, Caliban could easily have killed Prospero. In fact, that's what he wants to do as soon as he sees the chance. So, does Prospero have the right of self-defense?"

  Mutters. Scowls.

  "Let's vote on it," says Felix. "Yes?"

  Most hands go up, reluctantly. Red Coyote holds out.

  "Red Coyote?" says Felix. "He should allow Caliban to run loose and run the risk of being murdered by him?"

  "Shouldn't have been there in the first place," says Red Coyote. "It's not his island."

  "Did he choose to land there?" says Felix. "He's hardly an invader, he's a castaway."

  "He's still a slave-driver," says Red Coyote.

  "He could keep Caliban penned up all the time," says Felix. "He could kill him."

  "Says it himself, he wants the work out of him," says Red Coyote. "Picking up the firewood, washing the dishes. All of that. Plus, he does the same thing to Ariel. Makes him work, against his will. Won't give him liberty."

  "Granted," says Felix. "But he still has the right to defend himself, no? And the single way he can do that is through his magic, which is effective only as long as he has Ariel running errands for him. If tethering Ariel on a magic string--a temporary magic string--was the only weapon you had, you'd do the same. Yes?"

  This time there's general agreement. "Okay," says WonderBoy, "but why put the others through all that? The harpy scene, the craziness. Why doesn't he just kill the enemies and take their ship? Leave Caliban on the island, sail back to Milan or whatever?"

  Because there wouldn't be a play, thinks Felix. Or it would be a very different play. But if he wants the characters to stay real for them, he can't use that ploy.

  "I'm sure he was tempted," he says. "He probably felt like bashing their brains in. Who wouldn't, after what they did to him?" Widespread nodding. "However, if he enacted that kind of revenge he might get his dukedom back, but since Antonio made a deal with King Alonso whereby Milan is under the rule of Naples, then whoever inherits the kingdom of Naples will naturally bear a grudge. They wouldn't take kindly to their King and his son mysteriously disappearing, and the sailors would talk. The new ruler of Naples would kick Prospero out again or else kill him, and bring in someone else as the Duke of Milan. Failing that, Naples would go to war against Milan. Naples is bigger. Milan risks losing. What's Prospero's best plan?"

  "Ferdinand marries Miranda," says Bent Pencil. "That makes Miranda the Queen of Naples, and she brings the dukedom into a union with Naples. Peace with honor. It's what was called a dynastic marriage," he explains to the others.

  "Got it in one," says Felix. "But Prospero isn't a tyrant: he doesn't want to enforce a marriage for political reasons, the way Alonso has with his own daughter. He doesn't want to marry Miranda off as part of a cold-hearted flesh-trade deal. Instead, he wants the young folks--Ferdinand and Miranda--to fall in love, genuinely. So he uses his magic to arrange it. Or at least to help it along." Nods: they approve.

  "I wouldn't do that to my kid either," says Leggs. "Marry her off. Sucks."

  Felix smiles. "Prospero also needs to create a situation in which Alonso will accept this marriage," he says. "Ordinarily he wouldn't, because Naples is a kingdom and Milan is only a dukedom. Alonso doubtless wanted to marry his son, Ferdinand, into a big, rich kingdom. He'd be more powerful that way. And Ferdinand would have had to marry whoever his father picked."

  "It was the law, in those times," says Bent Pencil. "You had to go along."

  "Poxy law," says VaMoose.

  "So Prospero makes Alonso think Ferdinand is drowned, and then he does the big reveal," says 8Handz. "Look! He's alive! Cool."

  "And the King's so blissed out he'd let Ferdinand marry a frog if that's what he wanted," says SnakeEye.

  "Exactly," says Felix. "On the one hand, Ferdinand's pretend death is a punishment for Alonso--it's revenge, it causes anguish--but on the other hand, it's a calculated stratagem."

  "Two birds with one stone," says Krampus the Mennonite.

  "Not too dumb," says SnakeEye. "Good con."

  "So, is Prospero justified in what he does, considering his narrow range of options? Let's vote again," says Felix. "Who's for yes?"

  This time all hands go up. Felix unclenches his shoulders: relief. Prospero is absolved, at least for the time being. "We're agreed, then," he says. "Now let's talk about the enforcers."

  "Enforcers?" says Bent Pencil.

  "All authority ultimately rests on force," says Felix. "The island is a prison, and where there are prisons there have to be enforcers. Otherwise everyone inside would simply get out and run away." Emphatic nodding.

  "But there are no enforcers listed in the cast," says Bent Pencil. "In 'The Persons of the Play.' " He opens his text to the page, consults it.

  "They're present nonetheless," says Felix. "They do the pinching and the cramping when Caliban has been mouthy, and the hunting of Stephano and Trinculo, disguised as spirit hounds."

  "That's not Ariel?" says 8Handz. "I thought it was him."

  "Look again. Ariel commands them," says Felix. "It's right here. My goblins. That's who they are: Prospero's goblins. They aren't listed in the cast because they were played by whoever wasn't already onstage in that scene. You put on a mask and, bingo, you're a goblin. So everyone in our play will have two roles: their own role and one of Prospero's goblins. They're the agents of control, but also they're the enablers of vengeance and retribution. They do the hands-on dirty work."

  Ah yes. He can see how it could unfold: T
ony and Sal, surrounded by goblins. Herded by them. Menaced by them. Reduced to a quivering jelly. Hark, they roar, he thinks. Let them be hunted soundly. At this hour / lies at my mercy all mine enemies. He looks around the classroom, smiling benevolently.

  "Neat," says 8Handz. "I get it. Goblins 'R' Us."

  So far Anne-Marie hasn't met with the class. She's been learning her lines on her own, or rather refreshing them. Her first session inside Fletcher Correctional will be on Friday, the day Felix announces his casting, but he's arranged to have lunch with her first. He wants to prepare her, give her some idea of what she'll be walking into. Who, for instance, will be her Ferdinand? She has a right to know, in advance.

  As he eats his solitary morning egg--solitary because Miranda's off somewhere in her special private space, and like all teenage girls she's being cagey about where that is--he reviews the choices he has all but made.

  He's given much thought to these choices. There are the stated preferences of the actors themselves, but through long experience Felix has learned to disregard these. What natural Romeo has not longed to play Iago, and vice versa?

  Should he cast by type or against type? Uglies in parts that call for beauty, a gorgeous hunk as Caliban? Put them into roles that will force them to explore their hidden depths, or are those depths better left unexplored? Challenge the audience by showing them well-known characters in surprising and possibly disagreeable guises?

  During his past life at the Festival he'd been known for in-your-face envelope-pushing. In retrospect, he may on occasion have taken things too far. To be fair, more than on occasion; taking things too far had been his trademark. But this time, better not force it. He'll give the men parts they have a chance of performing well: he is after all a director, first and foremost. The play's the thing. His job is to help the actors help him execute it.

  He's made a set of notes, partly for his own use, but also to share with Anne-Marie. These notes must never go any further than the two of them, he will emphasize to her. After his fine speech to the class--"I don't care what you've done" and so forth--it would be disillusioning for his actors to find their criminal convictions spelled out in so much detail.