‘Set Me Free': Spaces and the Politics of Creativity in Margaret Atwood’s Hag-Seed (2016)

ABSTRACT This paper explores the politics of space, freedom and creativity through the prism of novelistic discourse in Margaret Atwood’s novel Hag-Seed (2016), which is a twenty-first-century adaptation of Shakespeare’s play, The Tempest (1610–1611). Hag-Seed, set in a Canadian prison, narrates the revenge orchestrated by the protagonist Felix on his antagonists Tony and Sal. Felix, an instructor in a prison-reform programme called the Fletcher’s Correctional Program where he teaches Shakespeare to the inmates, asks them to predict the future of the characters in The Tempest. The prisoners demonstrate agentivity as they bring their individual perspectives to bear on their interpretations. This paper locates its analysis within one such interpretation provided by the prisoners, and Felix’s interpretation of bondage and freedom within creative spaces, based on the words ‘Set me free’ uttered by Shakespeare’s Prospero in The Tempest. Can freedom exist as a discourse without the accompanying discourse of bondage? How does creativity within sub/cultural spaces mediate agentivity? The trope of prison shapes discourses on space and creativity in Hag-Seed. By considering the interpretations generated by the prisoners and the novelistic discourse, I explore the politics of creativity as moderated within and through the discourse of space, and its implications for freedom.