Beginning in October 2015, the Hogarth Shakespeare series (part of Penguin Random House) began publishing re-imaginings of Shakespeare's plays with each novel being written by a best-selling novelist using contemporary settings and prose. Earlier this week, the newest title in the series was published, a re-telling of The Tempest written by none other than Margaret Atwood.
This seemed a perfect opportunity to spotlight other variations on The Tempest in a new #44U list. Each story employees a different setting: ranging from a contemporary prison, to steampunk science fiction, to the cultural conflict of the early 1960s, to a new fantasy version coming in 2017.
Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood (2016) - using a contemporary setting, Atwood envisions Shakespeare's The Tempest with a betrayed theater director plotting his revenge from inside prison and staging a production of the play to draw in those who crossed him
The Dream of Perpetual Motion by Dexter Clarence Palmer (2010) - an imprisoned writer who's only 'companions' aboard a perpetually floating zeppelin, are the disembodied voice of his mad lover, Miranda and her cryogenically frozen father, Prospero, an insane, genius obsessed with creating a perpetual motion machine.
Prospero's Daughter by Elizabeth Nunez (2006) - in the early 1960's a white scientist, exiled for performing experiments on his patients, retreats with his daughter to a Caribbean island and will have to learn to deal with the fact that his child has fallen in love with a young boy of mixed-race.
Miranda and Caliban by Jacqueline Carey (Feburary 2017) - a dark, fantastical exploration of the budding relationship between a dutiful, loving daughter and the reluctant servant her father bewitched into servitude
Twitter: #44U or #4-4-U
