Comparative Drama

Hag-Seed, Meta-Adaptation, and Paratext

Drama, as Julie Sanders has written, is "an inherently adaptive art," but the line between production and adaptation is not always clear.¹ Differences between the interpretation of an original text and the creation of a new text can be difficult to judge. Cary Mazer has argued that all dramatic productions exist "along a continuum" of adaptation because "virtually every production deviates from the original script in intent, aesthetic method, theatrical convention, and ideology; scripts are routinely cut and trimmed, with scenes and segments transposed or repositioned … characters cut, conflated, or combined, with changes of age, race, and gender."² Indeed, the qualities used by Mazer to describe a production could be applied to almost any modern literary adaptation. Although Mazer herself distinguishes a production from an adaptation, ultimately she argues that the difference between a more radically inventive production—the kind that leads to the creation of an adaptation—and a more faithful representation of an antecedent text is "a difference in degree but not in kind."³

The close connection suggested by Mazer between production and adaptation bears some similarity to Gérard Genette's definition of an adaptation. In Genette's formulation, the adaptation, or hypertext, offers "a simple or direct transformation" of an antecedent text, what Genette calls the hypotext. The "transposing [of] the action" of Homer's Odyssey that [End Page 119] occurs in a work such as James Joyce's Ulysses is one such transformation.⁴ Among the most important categories of adaptation for Genette are the ones that cross genre: "serious transformation, or transposition, is without any doubt the most important of all hypertextual practices … [it] can give rise to works of vast dimensions … whose textual amplitude and aesthetic and/or ideological ambition may mask or even completely obfuscate their hypertextual character."⁵ Shakespeare originally wrote his dramatic works with the assumption of transposition; in other words, Shakespeare wrote his plays to be transformed from a page to the stage. With this intent came the understanding that performance is a necessarily interpretative act undertaken in a public space for an audience in a specific context. Generic transposition is also a practice Shakespeare could have conceptualized, at least to some degree, since he regularly adapted the plots of his plays from popular prose fiction of his era. And in converting these fictional tales to dramatic form, he prepared the way for them to be readapted and reinterpreted in our era.

In Hag-Seed (2106), Margaret Atwood makes the most out of this "invitation to reinvention"⁶ in her novelization of The Tempest, a play for which there is no known hypotext. The novel is an adaptation that engages in generic transposition in multifaceted ways as it uses both narrative and form to make the reader aware of the movement from one genre to another. Any novelist who comes to Shakespeare's work must be ready to wrestle both with its dramatic and poetic nature, for the prosification of a Shakespearean play will involve grappling with both. While poetics is beyond the scope of this essay, in what follows I will focus on the ways in which the move from dramatic work to novel is at the forefront of Atwood's mind in her adaptation of The Tempest. The reader is never allowed to forget that the novel is adapted not just from an antecedent text, but specifically from a dramatic work. Atwood intentionally cultivates this awareness in the reader by not only retelling the story of Shakespeare's play but also narrativizing the adaptative art. It is easy to assume that the purpose of Atwood's novel is a "faithful" translation of Shakespeare's late romance into the 21^st century. The novel's full title clearly categorizes it as a "retelling," leaving no question that the author intends the work to be read as an adaptation of The Tempest. Although radically changed from Shakespeare's deserted isle populated with Italian politicians to a literal [End Page 120] stage in Canada in 2013, Atwood painstakingly seeks out "equivalence" for each...