Previous
Chapter 18
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Hag-Seed, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Theater and The Tempest
Vengeance
Imprisonment and Marginalization
Transformation and Change
Grief
Summary
Analysis
Only one person wants to play Gonzalo, but fortunately it’s Bent Pencil, the very person Felix wanted to cast. Alonso and Sebastian aren’t popular with anyone, but lots of people want to play Antonio, Ferdinand, and Ariel. Almost everyone has rated Caliban highly. Felix decides to start with this difficult decision.
Rather than unilaterally making casting decisions, Felix tries to guide the actors into wanting the parts to which they are best suited. While he’s still controlling what happens, he’s much less tyrannical than Prospero, his inspiration.
Themes
Before this discussion, Felix bathes in the cabin; he only does this once a week, because it’s so difficult to heat up the water and wash in the cold air. Miranda is never in the cabin when it comes time for his bath; he doesn’t know where she goes. Felix wonders how Prospero and Miranda bathed on the island, especially with Caliban lying in wait for Miranda every time she strays from her father. Ariel must have watched over them. Felix muses that all unpleasant bodily functions are omitted in the theater.
In appearing only when it’s most convenient for him and decorously staying away when it isn’t, Miranda proves herself markedly unlike a real child. Although Felix doesn’t articulate this yet, he’s not really being a father by “caring for” the invisible Miranda—he’s clinging to the memory of something that is long gone.
Themes
After bathing, Felix puts on his pajamas and makes a glass of cocoa. Once he’s lying in bed, he feels Miranda reappear. He says goodnight, and it feels as though she’s brushed his forehead with her hand.
Here, it seems like Miranda is the parent, while Felix is the comforted child. She’s clearly more an expression of Felix’s grief than a reflection of his actual daughter.
Themes
When he arrives at class on Wednesday, Felix asks the actors to imagine the kind of being that Caliban is. The actors describe him as “a monster,” “stupid,” “evil,” and “savage.” Faking innocence, Felix asks why they want to play such a nefarious character. Everyone grins, saying that they “get him” and that they understand his desire for revenge on the people who have wronged him.
That the actors all identify with Caliban’s most nefarious attributes suggests the low esteem in which they hold themselves. However, by analyzing the ways in which Caliban is demonized by his circumstances and making him into a protagonist of sorts, the actors turn him into a symbol of personal empowerment.
Themes
Get the entire Hag-Seed LitChart as a printable PDF.
Felix points out that Caliban has other layers as well. Like Ariel, he can sing and dance; he also has the most romantic speech in the play, in which he speaks about his love for the island. His desire for revenge seems to link him to Prospero, but while Prospero wants to leave the island, Caliban wishes to rule it and fill it with children he will have by raping Miranda. Leggs mutters that this is “not a bad plan.”
It’s easy to see Caliban as just a monstrous prisoner, but Shakespeare makes certain that there are other factors complicating this simplistic assessment—one of the reasons that the play has often been treated as a more complicated examination of colonialism, rather than a straightforward endorsement of the system.
Themes
Felix acknowledges the fact that most of the actors don’t like Prospero, and tells them to think seriously before committing to the difficult part of Caliban. In the meantime, since one of the play’s main themes is imprisonment, he tells them to go through the text and list all the prisons. He tells them there are seven; there are actually nine, but he wants them to outdo him. When 8Handz asks what counts as a prison, Felix defines it as “any place or situation that you’ve been put in against your will.” Leggs ask if they’ll get cigarettes for identifying the most prisons.
Although Felix is playing the tyrannical authority figure that the prisoners dislike, he doesn’t actually resemble such a person in real life. In fact, with their condescending and exploitative attitudes towards the prisoners, it’s the visiting politicians who will most strongly recreate the dynamic between Prospero and Caliban.
Themes
