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
Felix hands out the bags of potato chips; everyone starts joking and clowning, although Felix knows they’ll start haggling over the cigarettes as soon as he’s gone. Taking Felix aside, Anne-Marie tells him how grateful she and “Freddie” are to him for throwing them together.
Anne-Marie probably understands better than Frederick the extent to which their relationship was planned. However, knowing this doesn’t make her think her feelings are any less real.
Themes
Leggs announces that he and his team have a surprise: an extra number they wrote about Hag-Seed, part of a musical they’re working on. In the musical, Stephano and Trinculo have put Hag-Seed in a cage to show him off, but he breaks free and sings about his freedom. The team starts the beat while Leggs returns to his Caliban persona, saying that he’s done with chores for other people. He’s not going to “walk behind you on the street” or “get on the back of the bus,” and the people who stole his land can give it “right back to us.”
In this final performance, Leggs and his team link Caliban explicitly to the struggles of different marginalized groups—from African Americans during the Civil Rights Movement to First Peoples trying to reclaim sovereignty over their land. While Caliban used to evoke their oppression and powerlessness, now he’s a much more positive figure, evoking the fight for dignity and justice.
Themes
Hag-Seed continues to protest at the injustices to which his masters have subjected him: they make him work for less than minimum wage and earn profits by putting him in jail. They think of him as “an animal, not even a man.” Now, Leggs says, Hag-Seed is becoming more powerful than those who oppress him: “Hag-Seed’s black and Hag-Seed’s brown…Hag-Seed’s yellow and Hag-Seed’s trash white, he goes by a lotta names, he’s roaming in the night.”
Referring obliquely to the prison-industrial system here, Leggs uses the figure of Caliban to discuss the extent to which incarceration has emerged as a new tool of social oppression, rather than a just system of punishment—just as Caliban’s imprisonment is more a function of Prospero’s desire for control than a repercussion for a specific misdeed.
Themes
Felix commends them on the powerful text, and Anne-Marie asks what happens once Caliban escapes. Leggs says that he will seek revenge on those who have harmed him; but he’s not yet sure whether this category includes Prospero and Miranda. Felix is interested to see that “Caliban has escaped the play,” in which he’s always imprisoned. Leggs asks Felix if he’ll direct the musical once they’ve finished it, and although he pretends to consider the question, he’s secretly very pleased.
For Felix, the important aspect of the new Caliban is that he’s free to write his own script now. In a sense, this is true of the prisoners as well—although their material circumstances have not changed, Felix has helped them develop the skills and confidence to analyze their lives and articulate their hopes for the future.
Themes
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