Margaret Atwood - Hag-Seed

“If anyone on the hiring end knew who I was, they’d say I was way overqualified. Too professional for this position.” A bigger smile: Estelle found this more convincing. “So it can be our secret,” Felix said, lowering his voice, leaning across the table. “You can be my confidante.”

“Oh, what fun!” She liked it. “A confidante! It’s like a Restoration play! The City Heiress , or…”

“By Aphra Behn,” said Felix. “Except the confidantes are burglars.” He was impressed: it was an obscure play, not one he’d ever done.

“Maybe I’ve always longed to be a burglar,” she laughed. “But seriously, this is quite an honor! I must have seen almost all of your plays, over at Makeshiweg, when you were there. I loved your Lear ! It was so, it was so…”

“Visceral,” said Felix, quoting one of the more enthusiastic reviews.

“Yes,” said Estelle. “Visceral.” She paused. “But this position…I mean, you are of course way overqualified. You realize it’s only part-time — three months a year. You wouldn’t expect a commensurate—”

“No, no,” said Felix. “Standard pay. I’ve been retired for a while, I’m bound to be rusty.”

“Retired? Oh, you’re too young to retire,” she said, a reflex compliment. “That would be a waste.”

“Too kind,” said Felix.

There was a pause. “You do understand that this is a prison,” she said at length. “You’ll be teaching, well, convicted criminals. The goal of the course is to improve their basic literacy skills so they can find a meaningful place in the community once they’re back in the world. Wouldn’t you be rather wasted on them?”

“It would be a challenge,” said Felix. “I’ve always liked challenges.”

“Let’s be frank,” said Estelle. “Some of these men have very short fuses. They act out. I wouldn’t want you to…” She clearly had a vision of Felix lying on the floor with a homemade shiv sticking out of his neck and a puddle of blood spreading around him.

“Dear lady,” said Felix, resorting to one of his posh-aristocrat stage accents, “in the early days of the theatre, actors were regarded as next door to criminals anyway. And I’ve known many actors — that’s what they do, they act out! Stage rage. There are ways of handling that. And, studying with me, they’ll be guaranteed to learn more self-control.”

Estelle was still wavering, but she said, “Well, if you’re willing to give it a try…”

“I’d need to do things in my own way,” said Felix, pushing his luck. “I’d want considerable latitude.” It was the beginning of the semester and the dead teacher had barely got started, so Felix himself would have room to create. “What do they usually read for this course?”

“Well, we’ve relied on The Catcher in the Rye ,” said Estelle. “Quite a lot. And some stories by Stephen King, they like those. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Many of them identify with that, and it’s simple to read. Short sentences.”

“I see,” said Felix. Catcher in the bloody Rye, he thought. Pablum for prep school juveniles. It was a medium- to maximum-security facility; these were grown men, they’d lived lives that had driven them far beyond those parameters. “I’ll be taking a somewhat different tack.”

“I hesitate to ask what tack,” said Estelle, cocking her head archly. Now that she’d accepted him for the job, she was relaxed enough to flirt. Watch your trousers, Felix, he admonished himself. She doesn’t have a wedding ring, so you’re fair game. Don’t start anything you can’t finish.

“Shakespeare,” said Felix. “That’s the tack.”

“Shakespeare?” Estelle, who’d been leaning forward, sat back in her chair. Was she reconsidering? “But surely that’s far too…there are a lot of words…They’ll get discouraged; maybe you should choose things more at the level of…To be frank, some of them can barely read.”

“You think Shakespeare’s actors did a lot of reading ?” said Felix. “They were journeymen, like”—he snatched an example from the air, possibly a bad one—“like bricklayers! They never read the whole play themselves; they only memorized their own lines, and their cues. Also they improvised a lot. The text wasn’t a sacred cow.”

“Well, yes, I know, but…” said Estelle. “But Shakespeare is such a classic.”

Too good for them, was what she meant. “He had no intention of being a classic!” Felix said, adding a tinge of indignation to his voice. “For him, the classics were, well, Virgil, and Herodotus, and…He was simply an actor-manager trying to keep afloat. It’s only due to luck that we have Shakespeare at all! Nothing was even published till he was gone! His old friends stuck the plays together out of scraps — bunch of clapped-out actors trying to remember what they’d said, after the guy was dead!” When in doubt, he told himself, just keep talking. It was an old trick for when you froze onstage: throw out a line, anything that sounded good, to give the prompter time to toss you the real one.

Estelle looked puzzled. “Well, yes, but what does that have to do with…”

“I believe in hands-on,” said Felix as authoritatively as he could.

“Hands on what?” said Estelle, truly alarmed now. “You have to respect their personal space, you’re not allowed to…”

“We’ll be performing,” said Felix. “That’s what I mean. We’ll be enacting the plays. That’s the only way you can really get inside the parts. Oh, don’t worry, I’ll fulfill the official criteria, whatever they are. They’ll do assignments and write essays and all of that. I’ll mark those. I suppose that’s what’s required.”

Estelle smiled. “You’re very idealistic,” she said. “Essays? I really…”

“Pieces of prose,” said Felix. “About whichever play we’re doing.”

“You really think so?” said Estelle. “You could get them to do that?”

“Give me three weeks,” said Felix. “If it’s not working out by then, I’ll do The Catcher in the Rye. Promise.”

“All right, agreed,” said Estelle. “Good luck with it.”

The first few weeks were a little rough, granted. Felix and Shakespeare had needed to work their way uphill over some fairly thorny ground, and Felix discovered that he was less prepared for the conditions inside than he’d thought he would be. He’d had to assert his authority, draw a few lines in the sand. At one point he’d threatened to walk out. There’d been some quitters, but those who’d stayed had been serious, and in the event the Fletcher Correctional Shakespeare class was a hit. In its own modest way, it was cutting edge; it was also, you could say — and Felix did say it to his students, explaining the term carefully — avant-garde. It was cool. After the first season, guys lined up for it. Astonishingly, their reading and writing scores went up, on average, by fifteen percent. How was the enigmatic Mr. Duke getting these results? Heads were shaken in wonder, fraud was suspected. But no, objective testing backed him up. The effect was real.

Estelle was given much credit, out in the wide world where academics gathered and conferences were held and theories were proposed and ministries approved budgets, but Felix didn’t begrudge her that. He was too busy. He was back in the theatre, but in a new way, a way he’d never anticipated in his earlier life. If anyone had told him then that he’d be doing Shakespeare with a pack of cons inside the slammer he’d have said they were hallucinating.

He’d been at it now for three years. He’d chosen the plays carefully. He’d begun with Julius Caesar , continued with Richard III, and followed that with Macbeth . Power struggles, treacheries, crimes: these subjects were immediately grasped by his students, since in their own ways they were experts in them.