Felix explains that the final prison is the play itself: Prospero requires the audience's applause to escape the island. He challenges the men to identify each prison present in the play, and by the end of the novel, they have found all but one. Felix pitches The Tempest to the inmates at Fletcher Correctional Facility by explaining to them that it is a play fundamentally concerned with confinement and what happens to people when they are kept behind bars, both figuratively and literally. The question of 'what constitutes a prison?' is one of the central inquiries in the novel. For both Felix and Prospero, the desire for revenge comes to replace all other modes of motivation, and it is both their only path to salvation and their greatest obstacle to overcome. While the parallel between the two characters is made clear throughout the novel, their shared desire for revenge is indicative of one of the major conflicts present in both works: not merely the conflict between Felix and his usurpers, but also the internal conflict Felix himself must confront when his deft control of the environment around him faces a number of threats. Felix, like Prospero, was ousted in his role as Artistic Director Prospero was the former King of Naples before his brother, Antonio, overthrew him and exiled him to the island where the play takes place.

This suspense lends the novel a sense of mystery much like the strange magic Prospero is able to conjure in Shakespeare's The Tempest.īecause Hag-Seed is a retelling of the Shakespearean play, the notion of revenge is crucial for understanding individual characters' motivations.

The novel is careful not to reveal Felix's particular form of revenge until the performance of the play itself. He becomes obsessed with his original idea for The Tempest and plans to stage an interactive theater version at Fletcher in which Tony, Sal, and other administrative figures will be present.

Felix begins thinking about revenge once he starts working at Fletcher Correctional Facility's Literacy Through Literature program. Revenge is one of the primary catalysts for the plot of the novel, as Felix's production of The Tempestis a long-term project aimed at getting back at Tony and Sal after they usurped him.

Hagseed and tempest