Whenever people ask me that inevitable question, “Who’s your favourite author?” I always say “Shakespeare”. There are some good reasons for that. First, so much of what we know about plots, characters, the stage, fairies and inventive swearwords comes from Shakespeare. Second, if you name a living author the other living authors will be mad at you because it isn’t them, but Shakespeare is conveniently dead.

Third, Shakespeare refuses to be boxed in. Not only do we know very little about what he really thought, felt and believed, but the plays themselves are elusive. Just when you think you’ve got a meaning nailed down, your interpretation melts like jelly and you’re left scratching your head. Maybe he’s deep, very deep. Or maybe he didn’t have a continuity editor. And Shakespeare will never turn up on a talkshow and be asked to explain himself, the lucky devil.

Shakespeare is infinitely interpretable. We’ve had a fascist Richard III, we’ve had a Canadian First Nations Macbeth, we’ve had a Tempest with a female Prospero called Prospera, starring Helen Mirren. In the 18th century they had a Tempest opera, which used only a third of Shakespeare’s original text. Caliban had a sister called Sycorax, Miranda had a sister called Dorinda, and there was an extra young man so Dorinda would have someone to marry.

Illustration by Nick Higgins

People have been redoing Shakespeare for a long time, often with odd results. And I too have redone Shakespeare, also with odd results. In honour of his 400th anniversary the Hogarth Shakespeare project has invited a number of authors to choose a play and revisit it in the form of a prose novel. I chose The Tempest. It was my first choice, by miles. It contains a great many unanswered questions as well as several very complex characters, and the challenge of trying to answer the questions and tease out the complexities was part of the attraction.

I’d thought about The Tempest before, and written about it as well. In my book about writers and writing – called, oddly enough, On Writers and Writing – there’s a chapter on the artist as magician and/or impostor called “Prospero, the Wizard of Oz, Mephisto & Co”. All of these figures are illusionists, as artists are. And illusionists always have a dubious side to them. The Wizard of Oz is only pretending to be a real magician: really he’s a fraud. But the magic in The Tempest is real.

Michael Clark as Caliban in Propero’s Books (1991) Photograph: Allstar/Channel 4

It is the story of a magician and former duke of Milan, Prospero, set afloat with his infant daughter Miranda after being deposed in a coup by his treacherous brother Antonio and Alonso, the king of Naples. They land on an island, already inhabited by a savage creature called Caliban, the son of a dead witch, Sycorax, and the air-spirit Ariel, who was imprisoned by Sycorax in a pine tree. Prospero at first befriends Caliban, but when the creature tries to rape Miranda, Prospero enslaves him with the aid of his magic.

When an auspicious star brings Prospero’s enemies within his reach 12 years later, he raises an illusory tempest with the aid of Ariel. His enemies, his one-time helper Gonzalo and Ferdinand, son of Alonso, end up on the island and are manipulated in various magical ways by Prospero, with the upshot that Ferdinand and Miranda fall in love and the enemies are entranced, tortured and, at length, forgiven.

Meanwhile, Caliban has joined two lowlifes, Trinculo and Stephano – a drunken butler and a jester – and the three of them plan to murder Prospero, but are punished by Prospero’s goblins. At the end, Ariel is set free, everyone sails off to Naples and Prospero steps out of his own play and asks to be released from it: perhaps the most puzzling ending to any Shakespeare play.

In On Writers and Writing, I wrote:

Prospero uses his arts – magic arts, arts of illusion – not just for entertainment, though he does some of that as well, but for the purposes of moral and social improvement. That being said, it must also be said that Prospero plays God. If you don’t happen to agree with him – as Caliban doesn’t – you’d call him a tyrant, as Caliban does. With a slight twist, Prospero might be the Grand Inquisitor, torturing people for their own good. You might also call him a usurper – he’s stolen the island from Caliban, just as his own brother has stolen the dukedom from him; and you might call him a sorcerer, as Caliban also terms him. We – the audience – are inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt, and to see him as a benevolent despot. Or we are inclined most of the time. But Caliban is not without insight.

Add to that the fact that Prospero’s loss of his dukedom is largely his own fault – by his own admission, he neglected to take care of his realm, plunging himself into his magic studies instead and delegating his power to Antonio – and we find him altogether an ambiguous gentleman.



I couldn’t write it straight – all the islands are now known; Prospero would have been rescued by helicopter

The first thing I did when starting this project was to reread the play. Then I read it again. Then I got my hands on all the films of it that I could find, and watched them. Then I read the play again.

Then came the usual episodes of panic and chaos: why had I foolishly agreed to write a book in this series? Why had I chosen The Tempest? Really it was impossible! What was the modern-day equivalent of a magician marooned on an island for 12 years with a now adolescent daughter? You couldn’t write that straight: all the islands are known, there are satellites now, they would have been rescued by a helicopter in no time flat. And what about the flying air spirit? And the Caliban figure?

Calm, calm, I told myself. I read the play again, this time backwards. The last three words Prospero says are “Set me free.” But free from what? In what has he been imprisoned?

Julian Bleach (Ariel) and Patrick Stewart at the Royal Shakespeare theatre, Stratford-on-Avon (2006)

I started counting up the prisons and imprisonments in the book. There are a lot of them. In fact, every one of the characters is constrained at some point in the play. This was suggestive. The play is about illusions: magic is the only weapon Prospero has. And it is about vengeance versus mercy, as in so many of Shakespeare’s plays. But it’s also about prisons. So I decided to set my novel in a prison.

Other questions quickly arose. Is Prospero’s island magical in itself? How to suggest that quality in a modern novel? Is the island a place of trial? Maybe both.

And the characters: is Prospero wise and kind, or a tetchy old crank? Is Miranda sweet and pure, or a more savvy, tougher girl who knows about wombs and abuses and vilifies Caliban? Is Caliban himself the Freudian id? Is he Natural Man? Is he a victim of colonial oppression, as he is frequently played these days? But what about his rapist tendencies? Is he bad by nature? Is he Prospero’s dark shadow? What does Prospero mean when he says of Caliban, at the end of the play, “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine?” And by the way, who is Caliban’s father?

Is she sweet or savvy? … Miranda by John William Waterhouse Photograph: Alamy

The Tempest is also a musical: it has more songs and dances and music in it than any other Shakespeare play. The main musician is Ariel, but Caliban also has musical talents. So I incorporated a lot of song and dance numbers in the novel.

But above all, The Tempest is a play about a producer/director/playwright putting on a play – namely, the action that takes place on the island, complete with special effects – that contains another play, the masque of the goddesses. Of all Shakespeare’s plays, this one is most obviously about plays, directing and acting.

How to do justice to all these elements in a modern novel? It was a huge challenge.

I called my novel Hag-Seed, which is one of the names used by Prospero when he is railing at Caliban, and Caliban is cursing him right back. Why name it after Caliban rather than Prospero? I won’t tell you that in advance, but there is a reason.

Hag-Seed is set in the year 2013, in Canada, in a region somewhat close to a town where there is an actual Shakespeare festival. It opens with a video of The Tempest that’s been made in a prison and is being watched by an unseen audience inside the prison. Act 1, Scene 1 – the actual tempest, with sailors running around and yelling – is in progress on screen, when suddenly there are sounds of a prison riot. Lockdown!

Cut to the backstory. (This is what Shakespeare gives us in Act 1, Scene 2.) Twelve years earlier, Felix Phillips, artistic director of the Makeshiweg theatre festival, was ousted from his position by Tony, his second in command, and Tony’s pal Sal O’Nally, a politician. In The Tempest, these characters are dukes and kings, but Canada does not have an overpopulation of those. The nearest equivalent to courtiers and influence-peddling and backroom deals is to be found in the world of federal politics.

My Prospero has the aid of a young computer hacker: after all, what is Ariel but a special effects man?

Felix has been living in exile in a countryside shanty built into a hillside by 19th-century settlers – the closest I could get to Prospero’s “cave” or “cell” – modelled, incidentally, on a real shanty I know quite well. Shakespeare does not provide Prospero with an outhouse, but I’ve taken care of that for Felix.

In isolation, one can hear voices. Felix has come to half-believe that the spirit of his only beloved child, Miranda – who died at the age of three – is with him, and is now 15. To ease his solitude, he’s taken a position as a drama teacher at the Fletcher Correctional Institute, and has been putting on Shakespeare plays there. (Similar prison programmes do in fact exist, or have existed, in the UK, US and Italy as well as in Canada.)

When an “auspicious star” – here, a twinkly female character called Estelle, who has a lot of influence – brings Felix’s enemies within his reach, he stages The Tempest in his prison, thereby hoping to entrap them, enchant them, and get both his revenge and his old position back. He has the aid of a young hacker inmate, who uses digital technology to great effect: what is Ariel to Prospero but an extremely efficient special-effects man, especially good with virtual thunder and lightning, not to mention musical accompaniments? Since no prisoner wants to play a girl, Felix hires a female actor to play the part of Miranda. Meanwhile, the spirit-girl Miranda, fascinated with the play, decides to … but no spoilers!

Ben Whishaw as Ariel in the 2010 film (2010). Photograph: Alamy

As with The Tempest, at the end the action is projected into the future, as the inmate student actors submit their reports about what they think will happen to the main characters once they’re aboard the ship to Naples. Hint: it’s not all good. One of the questions that’s bothered me about The Tempest: why would Prospero, having been betrayed by his evil brother once – an evil brother who does not repent, even when he’s been forgiven – throw away his magic weapons and then climb onboard a ship with that very same evil brother? What might happen then?

Writing Hag-Seed was strangely invigorating, and also very informative. I now know what a pignut is: not a peanut, as I’d previously thought, but a vegetable with nodules on the underground stem. And, in a blinding flash of light, I discovered the answer to something that’s always bothered me. Why do Trinculo and Stephano go on and on about Caliban smelling like a fish? Are they just being bullies? No, came the shattering insight! Caliban smells like a fish because he’s the one who catches the fish for Prospero and Miranda. That’s what they’ve been eating for 12 years: fish, pignuts, and scamels, whatever they are. No bread, no butter, no pepper. And no wine – that’s why Caliban falls victim to the demon drink the first time he encounters it.

Oh, and marmosets. And jays’ nests. It’s basic. No wonder Prospero is in such a mad hurry to get back to Milan.

• Hag-Seed is published on 6 October by Hogarth. Margaret Atwood will take part in a number of events across the UK from 6 October starting with the Southbank Centre’s London literature festival. margaretatwood.ca/events or penguin.co.uk.