Margaret Atwood - Hag-Seed

Antonio, Prospero’s evil brother, is more popular: five list him as a nine.

Stephano and Trinculo: two each. That makes four who see themselves as jokers.

Eight of them fancy themselves as Ferdinand, of which six are wishful thinkers: no way they could be convincing as the romantic lead. But two are possible.

Ariel, twelve. Many, it seems, are seriously interested in aliens and special effects.

And Caliban, an astonishing fifteen.

Hard choices to be made on Wednesday, thinks Felix. He’ll start with Caliban. Caliban is secretly poetic. By the time they’ve talked that aspect through, some of the contenders will surely have dropped out. There’s more to Caliban, he’ll tell them, than just an ugly face.

In preparation for the stern task ahead, Felix takes his weekly bath in the tin washtub. It’s a production. First he has to heat the water, on the hotplate and also in the electric kettle. Then he has to mix the hot with cold from the hand pump. Then he has to disrobe. Then he has to get in. It’s a chilly, slippery business at this time of year, with a draft coming in under the door and — right now — ice pellets pattering against the window. Matters are not helped by the threadbare towel. He ought to get another one; what holds him back? His sense of design, that’s what. A new towel would not fit the sparse, monkish decor.

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.