ABSTRACT
The intellectual snobbery behind the oft-used phrase ‘the book’s better than the film’ will be familiar to anyone engaging with modern culture. But how do our expectations of canonicity, literary merit, and commercial value shift when adapting a play into a book? In 2015, the publisher Hogarth decided to mark the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death by commissioning eight novelists to re-tell eight of Shakespeare’s plays. This chapter looks at Margaret Atwood’s Hag-Seed (2016) as an adaptation of The Tempest, and explores how such novelisations function as both a creative approach to literary criticism and a commemorative process that reinforces rather than challenges the hegemony of the canon.
