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Margaret Atwood’s novel, Hag-Seed, is part of a Hogarth series in which famous novelists rewrite or reinterpret Shakespeare plays, in this case The Tempest. The novel, in this reader’s opinion, is a bit over-loaded. Atwood’s rewriting of Shakespeare takes place on two levels. First, a former artistic director named Felix pursues vengeance against several men who had him fired from his job imaginatively directing plays at a local drama festival. Much in his personal story parallels that of Prospero, including a daughter named Miranda, who died at the age of three but still lives on with her father as an imagined presence. Second, Felix takes a job as an instructor of literature in a local prison, where he stages plays, ultimately The Tempest, in which his prisoner-students play most of the roles. These two levels come together as Felix exacts vengeance inside the prison against his enemies, now powerful politicians, who are visiting his staging of The Tempest that day with the plan of cancelling the prison program. Yes, all this might be rather hard to follow . . . and the full story is still more complicated. But I did read on rather impulsively because I have taught literature in maximum and medium security prisons and was flabbergasted at the latitude this fictional instructor was allowed with his class. Probably Canadian prisons are more liberal than those of my state in what some have labelled “The Incarceration Nation,� but I seriously doubt an instructor would have been permitted to carry out half of the actions described in this novel. Oh well, it is a novel and, like all of Atwood’s works, gracefully written. As for throwing new light on The Tempest, well, the best part of the novel is probably the prisoners� imagined depiction of what might have happened to different characters after Shakespeare’s play ends, which includes, as we might expect in this context, a vindication of Caliban.