This Tempest is a chancy rock gig, glad of big noise and scuffled improvisation. Drug dealers supply hallucinogens as they did in the 16th century, but now the soundtrack is Metallica’s “Ride the Lightning”, and you wouldn’t want the humiliating results spread about on social media.Ī hundred years ago, enthralled and confounded by The Tempest, as so many novelists have been, Henry James imagined Shakespeare as a divine musician at close of day, playing the harpsichord, perhaps, held in the “lucid stillness of his style”, performing a blissfully solitary concert. It’s done with gusto and extravagance: the artful traps conceived by Prospero are realised by an Ariel called 8Handz whose dramaturgy is of the digital sort. Hag-Seed is the fourth novel in the Hogarth Shakespeare series, following Jeanette Winterson’s retelling of The Winter’s Tale, Howard Jacobson’s of The Merchant of Venice and Anne Tyler’s of The Taming of the Shrew.
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