The novel had varying reception among critics and audiences. A witty, dark and imaginative adaptation of Shakepeare's play, Hag-Seed manages to convincingly create a vengeful Duke Prospero [ citation needed] from the slightly ridiculous, and certainly more sympathetic, director Felix. Dealing with themes of loss, revenge, a life of imprisonment and the concept of closure, Atwood uses Felix's lessons on The Tempest to the actor-inmates to demonstrate the parallels between her text and the original play. Hag-Seed is a treat. It’s a beautifully constructed adaptation, one that stands on its own but is even richer when read against its source — and can, in turn, enrich its source material. It’s playful and thoughtful, and it singlehandedly makes a good argument for the value of adapting Shakespeare.” – Vox It's all great fun, full of wit and invention and incident… And Hag-Seed is very funny, very often. The scenes where Felix's hard-chaw prisoners insult each other strictly through Shakespearean language are especially enjoyable. Darragh McManus, Irish Independent

A sudden clap of thunder wakes Sal and Lonnie up and the cell’s door opens; music lures the politicians down the hall and into another room, where a bowl of grapes is waiting. Sal, Sebert, and Tony eat the grapes, which Felix has injected with psychedelic drugs; soon they are all writhing on the floor, gripped by a bad trip.

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Rich and inventive… The play-within-a-play tripe is audaciously Shakespearean, and so is Atwood’s free-ranging imagination and witty way with language. Simon Shaw, Mail on Sunday the island is a theatre. Prospero is a director. He’s putting on a play within which there’s another play. If his magic holds and his play is successful, he’ll get his heart’s desire.” – Felix Felix is at the top of his game as Artistic Director of the Makeshiweg Theatre Festival. His productions have amazed and confounded. Now he’s staging a Tempest like no other. It will boost his reputation. It will heal emotional wounds.

Atwood chooses a setup that could have been cheesy and turns it into something extraordinary: Felix is the wronged artistic director of a Canadian theatre festival. He has been cast aside thanks to the interventions of a Machiavellian rival just at the moment when he was about to unleash his greatest creation upon the world – an ambitious production of The Tempest. It was to have been a play that would lay to rest all the failures of his life and career. It was also an act of grieving to mark the death of his daughter Miranda. (See where this is going? I don’t think you even have to know The Tempest.) And so we have a play within a play within a novel.This quote reveals Felix's opinions of Anne-Marie Greenland, the young woman who ends up playing Miranda in his production of The Tempest. Here, readers are able to draw further parallels between Felix and Prospero, as Felix thinks of himself as the "creator" of Anne-Marie's career much like Prospero retains control over his daughter Miranda throughout the play. This quote is significant because it highlights one of Felix's more problematic qualities, namely his desire to control the female figures in his life -- a desire that, throughout the rest of the novel, will be challenged and ultimately squelched. Felix immediately chooses to exile himself in a cabin in the Ontario countryside. This period of Felix’s story has been decried by critics as the least plausible; while Prospero was stranded on a deserted island from which he could not escape, Felix’s exile was voluntary and the ability to leave was well within his power. Nine years later, he gets a job as a literacy teacher at a local prison. A dozen years later, the length of time Prospero lived on the island, Tony and Sal reenter Felix’s life with a visit to the prison and a threat to end the literacy program. Felix then plots his revenge and plans a new production of The Tempest. Atwood brilliantly pulls off the caper in a short novel that should be assigned to high school students as a hilarious riff on one of Shakespeare’s more mystifying plays. It’s much more than a retelling; it’s an ingenious analysis and critique rolled into one.” — St. Louis Post-Dispatch We could put them on show,” says TimEEz. “Gibbering lunatics. Street people. Addicts. Dregs of society. Always good for a laugh” – Irony of the prisoners gaining power In Hag-Seed , Atwood recasts Shakespeare’s The Tempest as a modern-day play-within-a-play, with Prospero updated as Felix, the artistic director of the Makeshiweg Theater Festival, known for his increasingly outrageous interpretations. In the grief-filled aftermath of the death of Felix’s daughter, Miranda, he is manipulated by a Machiavellian colleague, loses his job, and goes into exile, where he plots revenge against those who lost him his job. He hopes for retribution after he is hired as the literacy teacher at a local prison and engineers a one-of-a-kind performance of The Tempest . Principal characters

An actress, dancer, and former gymnast who is cast in the role of Miranda in The Tempest as a teenager before the production gets canceled and Felix is fired. She is hired by Felix twelve years later to play the same role in his Fletcher Correctional Players' production of The Tempest. Similar to their roles of Miranda and Prospero, Anne-Marie and Felix share a close, father-daughter bond, despite not actually being related. She falls in love with Freddie by the end of the story, similar to Miranda and Ferdinand in The Tempest. Lonnie Gordon Margaret Atwood’s modern retelling is an entertaining romp of revenge, redemption.” — Minneapolis Star-Tribune Wolfe, Graham. Theatre-Fiction in Britain from Henry James to Doris Lessing: Writing in the Wings. Routledge, 2019. 2. One day, Estelle summons Felix to lunch to confide a rumor that Sal and Tony are going to cancel the literacy program after seeing the play, in a bid to seem tough and frugal to their constituents. Estelle is furious but Felix, finally committing to his plan, tells her that he knows a way to save the program. She agrees to help in any way she can. He has captured his Miranda, and Ariel has been transformed and accepted. He can sense the rest of his cast emerging as if from a fog, their faces indistinct but present. So far, his charms hold good." NarratorFelix, as both an intricate and well-drawn modern man and a thoughtful reinterpretation of Prospero that exhibits a deep understanding of Shakespeare’s protagonist, is one of Atwood’s biggest successes in this book. Felix can be kind and patient when dealing with the inmates. He can be cruel in his revenge, allowing a character to believe his child is in peril. He can also be funny, initiating a rule that the inmates are only allowed to swear using Shakespeare’s language from the play; thus the title, Hag-Seed, an insult Prospero hurls at Caliban. Felix has many layers, and since the story is told in the third person through Felix’s perspective, he is understood more intimately than any other character in the book. He is also a character who earns great sympathy as a despairing father who lost his beloved daughter, Miranda. Felix as the grieving father, that, although it differs significantly from Shakespeare’s version, makes the contemporary portrayal of him real and compelling. Although, as some critics have noted, these moments of grief rest somewhat uncomfortably amidst the silliness of the book; Shakespeare was a master of such hairpin turns from comedy to tragedy and employed them often. Though Felix’s Miranda died at age three, he conjures a version of her to share his hovel in exile, joining him in her ghost incarnation for meals and games of chess. She ages just as Felix does, and like Prospero, Felix eventually realizes he has relied too heavily on her companionship. Somewhat confusingly, however, despite her name and parentage, she mirrors Ariel, Prospero’s enslaved fairy spirit, more closely than Prospero’s daughter. She casts The Tempest adrift in a prison and makes a magisterial case for the timeless, classless relevance of Shakespeare’s plays. Jim Crace, New Statesman Critics aside, Hag-Seed is an entertaining novel, balancing humor and poignancy with revenge and anguish. While many will find it an engaging read, it will be most enjoyed and appreciated by those who are familiar with Shakespeare’s The Tempest. For them, Atwood conjures “such stuff as dreams are made on.” Review Sources