Hagseed:Tempest Quotes and Themes PDF

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Quotes and Themes for Hagseed + Tempest, HSC advanced English...

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Hag-seed & Tempest Themes & Quotes Revenge/Vengence • Revenge is one of the primary catalysts for the plot of the novel, as Felix's production of The Tempest is a long-term project aimed at getting back at Tony and Sal after they usurped him. Felix begins thinking about revenge once he starts working at Fletcher Correctional Facility's Literacy Through Literature program. He becomes obsessed with his original idea for The Tempest and plans to stage an interactive theater version at Fletcher in which Tony, Sal, and other administrative figures will be present. The novel is careful not to reveal Felix's particular form of revenge until the performance of the play itself. This suspense lends the novel a sense of mystery much like the strange magic Prospero is able to conjure in Shakespeare's The Tempest." • Because Hag-Seed is a retelling of the Shakespearean play, the notion of revenge is crucial for understanding individual characters' motivations. Felix, like Prospero, was ousted in his role as Artistic Director; Prospero was the former King of Naples before his brother, Antonio, overthrew him and exiled him to the island where the play takes place. While the parallel between the two characters is made clear throughout the novel, their shared desire for revenge is indicative of one of the major conflicts present in both works: not merely the conflict between Felix and his usurpers, but also the internal conflict Felix himself must confront when his deft control of the environment around him faces a number of threats. For both Felix and Prospero, the desire for revenge comes to replace all other modes of motivation, and it is both their only path to salvation and their greatest obstacle to overcome."

Revenge/Vengence Quotes:

- “His magic garment is hanging in there too, shoved to the back. The cloak of his defeat, dead husk of his drowned self. No, not dead, but changed. In the gloom, in the gloaming, it’s been transforming itself, slowly coming alive.” (Hag-Seed, p.63)

- “Fool, he tells himself. She’s not here. She was never here. It was imagination and wishful thinking, nothing but that. Resign yourself. He can’t resign himself.” (Hag-Seed, p.107)

- "He wanted revenge. He longed for it. He dreamed about it.. Tony and Sal must suffer.” (HagSeed, p.41)

- “Oh, to watch their two faces! Oh, to twist the wire! He wants to see pain.” (Hag-Seed, p.72) - “be collected; No more amazement. Tell your pious heart theres no harm done.” (Tempest, p.9, ln.12-13)

- “those being all my study, the government I cast upon my brother, and to my state grew stranger, being transported and rapt in secret studies.” “be collected; No more amazement. Tell your pious heart theres no harm done.” (Tempest, p.13, ln.74-6)

- “The rarer action is in virtue than in vengeance.”(Tempest, p.127, ln.27-8) - “While you here do snoring lie, Open-eyed conspiracy His time doth take. If of life you keep a care, Shake off slumber and beware.” (Tempest, p.61, ln.297-301)

- “Thou most lying slave, Whom stripes may move, not kindness! I have used thee, Filth as thou art, with human care, and lodged thee In mine own cell till thou didst seek to violate” (Tempest, p.321, ln.345-7)

Imprisonment • The question of "what constitutes a prison?" is one of the central inquiries in the novel. Felix pitches The Tempest to the inmates at Fletcher Correctional Facility by explaining to them that it is a play fundamentally concerned with confinement and what happens to people when they are kept behind bars, both figuratively and literally. He challenges the men to identify each prison present in the play, and by the end of the novel, they have found all but one. Felix explains that the final prison is the play itself: Prospero requires the audience's applause to escape the island. Ending on this note suggests that Felix has also imprisoned himself in his own production of The Tempest; he has fallen victim to his own obsession with revenge, and the novel remains ambiguous as to whether he will be able to successfully escape his self-confinement." Imprisonment Quotes:

- “By choosing this shack and the privations that would come with it, he would of course be sulking. He’d be hair-shirting himself, playing the flagellant, the hermit. Watch me suffer. He recognised his own act, an act with no audience but himself.” (Hag-Seed, p.31)

- “Your profanity, thinks Felix, has often been your whoreson hag-born progenitor of literacy. Along with your whoreson cigarettes, may the red plague rid them.” (Hag-Seed, p.89)

- “Prospero says to the audience, in effect, Unless you help me sail away, I’ll have to stay on the island – that is, he’ll be under an enchantment. He’ll be forced to re-enact his feelings of revenge, over and over. It would be like hell.” (Hag-Seed, p.275)

- “Prisons are for incarceration and punishment, not for spurious attempts to educate those who cannot, by their very natures, be educated. What’s the quote? Nature versus nurture, something like that. Is it from a play?” (Hag-Seed, p.205)

- "The last three words in the play are ‘set me free,’" says Felix. "You don’t say ‘set me free’ unless you’re not free. Prospero is a prisoner inside the play he himself has composed. There you have it: the ninth prison is the play itself.” (Hag-Seed, p. 275)

- “The endgame was something quite different.” (Hag-Seed, p.283) - “trying to confine Prospero within their calculated perimeters. Trying to make him one thing or the other. Trying to make him fit.” (Hag-Seed, p.179)

- "Might I but through my prison once a day, Behold this maid. All corners else o' th' earth, Let liberty make use of. Space enough, Have I in such a prison.” (Tempest, p.41, ln.489-492)

- "Can thoust remember, A time before we came unto this cell” (Tempest, p.11, ln.38-9) - “If thou more murmur’st, I will rend an oak, And peg thee in his knotty entrails till, Thou hast howled away twelve winters.” (Tempest, p.27, ln.294-6)

- “My library, Was dukedom large enough.” (Tempest, p.15, ln.109-110)

- “Dost thou forget From what a torment I did free thee?” (Tempest, p.25, ln.250-1) - “Deservedly confined into this rock, Who hadst deserved more than a prison.” (Tempest, p.31, ln.361-2)

Grief & Loss • Both Prospero and Felix have daughters named Miranda, but readers learn early on that Felix's daughter died before she turned five years old. It is clear that Felix has never recovered from the loss of Miranda and, just as Prospero finds himself marooned on an island with his daughter, so Felix carries the ghost of Miranda around with him at all times. He imagines her living with him in his run-down shack, fantasizes about teaching her how to play chess, and even casts her as Ariel's unofficial understudy in his production of The Tempest at Fletcher. Felix's grief over the loss of his daughter manifests, then, as an inability to grasp fully the reality of which he is a part, and his interactions with the imagined Miranda can be considered escapist fantasies in which he, like Prospero, attempts to control and mediate fate." • The conclusion of the novel suggests that Felix has been able to cope with the loss through his production of The Tempest. In all his literary discussions he has with the actors about the various prisons in the play, the men seem particularly drawn to the character of Ariel as a prisoner of Prospero's whims. At the end of The Tempest, Prospero announces Ariel's freedom. At the end of Hag-Seed, Felix uses the language of Prospero to "free" the memory of his daughter Miranda: "To the elements be free," Felix says. The narration then confirms, "And, finally, she is" (292). This use of Shakespearean language at this particular point in the story indicates that through his production of the play, Felix has experienced some form of growth that has allowed him to finally leave the past behind and pursue a future untainted by extreme grief." Grief & Loss Quotes:

- “Miranda would become the daughter who had not been lost; who’d been a protecting cherub, cheering her exiled father…What he couldn’t have in life he might still catch sight of through his art: just a glimpse, from the corner of his eye.” (Hag-Seed, p.15)

- “What to do with such a sorrow? It was like an enormous black cloud boiling up over the horizon…He had to transform it, or at the very least enclose it.” (Hag-Seed, p.15)

- “What has he been thinking—keeping her tethered to him all this time? Forcing her to do his bidding? How selfish he has been! Yes, he loves her: his dear one, his only child. But he knows what she truly wants, and what he owes her.” (Hag-Seed, p.283)

- “Fool, he tells himself. She’s not here. She was never here. It was imagination and wishful thinking, nothing but that. Resign yourself. He can’t resign himself.” (Hag-Seed, p.107)

- “If she’d lived, she would have been at the awkward teenager stage: making dismissive comments, rolling her eyes at him, dying her hair, tattooing her arms…But none of this has happened. She remains simple, she remains innocent. She’s such a comfort.” (Hag-Seed, p.63)

- “Idiot, he tells himself. How long will you keep yourself on this intravenous drip? Just enough illusion to keep you alive. Pull the plug, why don’t you? Give up your tinsel stickers, your paper

cutouts, your coloured crayons. Face the plain, unvarnished grime of real life.” (Hag-Seed, p.177)

- “But at least he’s given them a start. His life has had this one good result, however ephemeral that result may prove to be. But everything is ephemeral, he reminds himself. All gorgeous palaces, all cloud-capped towers. Who should know that better than he?” (Hag-Seed, p.281)

- “Well your contact with reality, […] they think you have mental health issues.” (Hag-Seed, p.20) - “I explained to them that you’ve been in shock, ever since your daughter…ever since your recent trig loss, but that I was sure you’d pull out of it.” (Hag-Seed, p.20)

- “Lavinia, Juliet, Cordelia, Perdita, Marina. All the lost daughters. But some of them had been found again. Why not his Miranda?” (Hag-Seed, p.15)

- "He would create a fit setting for this reborn Miranda he was willing into being. He would outdo himself as an actor-director. He would push every envelope, he would twist reality until it twangled. There was a feverish desperation in those long-ago efforts of his, but didn't the best art have desperation at its core? Wasn't it always a challenge to Death? A defiant middle finger on the edge of the abyss?” (Hag-Seed, p.15-6)

- “That’s what you do while you hold their feverish hands and stroke their foreheads in the hospital room, but despite everything they slip gently away from you, into the dark backward and abysm of time.” (Hag-Seed, p.238)

- “‘Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, Life is but a dream.’ ” A chill shoots through Felix. The hair on his neck bristles. “I used to sing that to her,” he whispers to himself.” (Hag-Seed, p.238)

- “Anyway I succeeded,” he tells himself. “Or at least I didn’t fail.” Why does it feel like a letdown?” (Hag-Seed, p.239)

- “What happens in riots? People die, who knows how?” (Hag-Seed, p.221) - “she’s moved gently away from him, fading like an old Polaroid. Now she’s little more than an outline; an outline he fills with sadness.” (Hag-Seed, p.14)

- “Quite simply, his Miranda must be released from her glass coffin; she must be given a life.” (Hag-Seed, p.41)

- "Poor worm, thou art infected; the visitation shows it.” (Tempest, p.81, ln.33-4) - “If by your art, me dearest father, you have put the wild waters in this roar, allay them.” (Tempest, p.9, ln.1-2)

- "Sitting on a bank, Weeping again the King my father’s wrack, This music crept by me upon the waters, Allaying both their fury and my passion, With its sweet air.” (Ferdinand thinks his father is dead) (Tempest, p.33, ln.388-392)

- “Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows.” (Tempest, p.67, ln.35) - “This my mean task would be As heavy to me as odious, but The mistress which I serve quickens what's dead, And makes my labours pleasures.” (Tempest, p.79, ln.4-7)

- “As you from crimes would pardoned be, Let your indulgence set me free.” (Tempest, p.145, ln. 19-20)

Theatricality of Life • Throughout the novel, Atwood champions the idea that art, the humanities, creativity, and theater specifically can be used for personal growth among diverse groups of people. The inmates, for example, benefit from their participation in The Tempest in that it provides them with an outlet to experiment with their own creativity in a space that is usually heavily surveilled and controlled by others. As such, a number of inmates find themselves identifying with particular characters in The Tempest—notably Ariel, who is under Prospero's control—and that identification leads to an unconventional but meaningful interpretation of how the play should be performed. Ariel, for example, is represented as an alien rather than a fairy, a result of the inmates' discussion of him as someone markedly isolated in the world of the play." • The inmates, however, are not the only people to personally benefit from their attention to Shakespeare's theater. Felix, too, uses the forum of theater not only to successfully execute his revenge, but also, subconsciously, to overcome his grief over the loss of his daughter. Just as Felix enriches the minds of the actors with detailed discussions about The Tempest and theater more generally, so do the actors enrich Felix's otherwise lonely life. Throughout the novel, Atwood juxtaposes scenes of energetic and engaged dialogue at Fletcher with slow-paced and macabre depictions of Felix home alone in his run-down shack. This alternation between moments of sociality and isolation help illustrate how the Literacy Through Literature program encourages personal growth for those learning and those instructing alike."

Theatricality of Life Quotes:

- “Watching the many faces watching their own faces as they pretended to be someone else— Felix found that strangely moving. For once in their lives, they loved themselves.” (Hag-Seed, p.58)

- “His magic garment is hanging in there too, shoved to the back. The cloak of his defeat, dead husk of his drowned self. No, not dead, but changed. In the gloom, in the gloaming, it’s been transforming itself, slowly coming alive.” (Hag-Seed, p.63)

- “This is the extent of it, Felix muses. My island domain. My place of exile. My penance. My theatre.” (Hag-Seed, p.81)

- “Colonialism,” says 8Handz, who spent a lot of time on the Internet in his former life as a hacker. “Prospero thinks he’s so awesome and superior, he can put down what other people think.” (Hag-Seed, p.91)

- “…the island is a theater. 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. But if he fails…” (Hag-Seed, p.116)

- “…it’s Ariel who changes Prospero’s mind, from revenge to forgiveness, because despite the crap they did, he feels sorry for the bad guys and what they’re being put through…so we take it that’s okay—to change our own minds.” (Hag-Seed, p.245)

- “The spell is now controlled by the audience, he says: unless they vote the play a success by clapping and cheering, Prospero will stay imprisoned on the island.” (Hag-Seed, p.274)

- "Tony's risen like a gas balloon ever since. From the life of theatre to the theatre of life, you could say, and Sal was his ladder…” (Hag-Seed, p.205)

- "Very soon it will be thunder time.” (Hag-Seed, p.198) - “Felix brushes his teeth. Then he brushes his other teeth, the false ones, and slides them into his mouth. Despite the layer of pink adhesive he’s applied, they don’t fit very well; perhaps his mouth is shrinking. He smiles: the illusion of a smile. Pretense, fakery, but who’s to know?” (Hag-seed, p.9)

- “But real life is brilliantly colored, says another part of his brain. It’s made up of every possible hue, including those we can’t see. All nature is a fire: everything forms, everything blossoms, everything fades. We are slow clouds…” (Hag-Seed, p.178)

- “Trust the play. But is the play trustworthy?” (Hag-Seed, p.144) - “All you need is a few items: the brain completes the illusion.” (Hag-Seed, p.165) - “In the gray light of day it looked stupid. But onstage, finished, interwoven with foliage, spraypainted with gold accents, highlighted with sequins, it would have been splendid.” (Hag-Seed, p.26)

- “his magic spells have now been overthrown, he must remain imprisoned on the island unless the audience pardons him, and sets him free by using its own magic to applaud the play.” (HagSeed, p.289)

- “The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life, Is rounded with a sleep.” (Tempest, p.115, ln.153-9)

- “But release me from my bands, With the help of your good hands. Gentle breath of yours my sails, Must fill, or else my project fails, Which was to please.” (Tempest, p.145, ln.9-14)

Power Quotes:

- "devious, twisted bastard, Tony” (Hag-Seed, p.23) - “It pleases him to see his enemies drawing ever nearer, as if they’re being sucked into a vortex of his own creation.” (Hag-Seed, p.192)

- “Ariel, thy charge Exactly is performed; but there’s more work.” (Tempest, p.23, ln.237-8) - “I am your wife… If not, I’ll die your maid” (Tempest, p.85, ln.85-6) - “My high charms work, and these, mine enemies, are all knit up in their distractions. They now are in my power.” “be collected; No more amazement. Tell your pious heart theres no harm done.” (Tempest, p.101, ln.88-90)

- “If thou neglect’st or dost unwillingly, What I command, I’ll rack thee with old cramps, Fill all thy bones with aches, make thee roar That beasts shall tremble at thy din.” (Tempest, p.31, ln.368-371)

- “Pardon, master. I will be correspondent to command, And do my spiriting gently.” (Tempest, p.27, ln.297-8)

- “What cares these roarers for the name of king?” (Tempest, p.3, ln.15) - “Twenty consciences, That stand 'twixt me and Milan, candied be they, And melt ere they molest.” (Tempest, p. 61, ln. 275-8)

- “this thing of darkness, I acknowledge mine.” (Tempest, p.141, ln.273)

Magic/illusion/reality quotes:

- “No, Felix, it isn’t, he tells himself firmly. Prospero is not crazy. Ariel exists. People other than Prospero see him and hear him. The enchantments are real.” (Hag-Seed, p.144)

- Was he being reckless? Yes, but the whole operation was reckless.” (Hag-Seed, p.193) - “He’ll break his staff, he’ll drown his book, because it’s time for the younger people to take over.” (Hag-Seed, p.280)

- “All you need is a few items: the brain completes the illusion.” (Hag-Seed, p.165) - "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.” (Hag-Seed, p.106)“The rarer action is / In virtue than in vengeance, he hears inside his head. It’s Miranda. She’s prompting him.” (Hag-Seed, p.239)

- “But now she whispers, I would, sir, were I human.” (Hag-Seed, p.231) - “Quite simply, his Miranda must be released from her glass coffin; she must be given a life.” (Hag-Seed, p.41)

- “It is real,” he says. “More than real. Hyper-real. You’ll see.” - "A tempestuous noise of thunder and lightning heard” (Tempest, p.3, ln.1) - “Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits and Are melted into air, into thin air. And like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous ...