Breakdown of a Band 6 Mod A Essay: The Tempest & Hagseed

Hi, I’m Anika - a recent HSC graduate and KIS tutor with a strong academic background in English Advanced!

While I was fortunate to achieve a high Band 6 result, Module A was a component I continually refined throughout the year. It was the module that demanded the most precision, conceptual clarity and control - particularly when navigating the rich textual conversation between The Tempest and Hagseed.

Through sustained practice, feedback and purposeful refining, I developed a clear framework or approaching this module with depth and confidence. In this article, I’ll break down the anatomy of a Band 6 response - and how you, too, can replicate that level of sophistication in your writing.

The Essay Question

When we engage with a text, the question we must ask ourselves is, ‘What is this text really about?

Consider the pair of prescribed texts that you have studied in Module A. To what extent does your engagement with the later text make you ask this question about the earlier text?

In interrogating Atwood’s 2016 post-modern hybrid novel, Hagseed, we are to a great extent positioned to reconsider Shakespeare’s interrogation of the fragility of human control of self and the collective in his latent tragicomedy, The Tempest (1630). Responding to her post-modern context’s challenge to systems of absolute authority, Atwood re-establishes the inevitability of power struggle rooted in the human desire to maintain control of one’s narrative and identity by transforming Shakespeare’s tragic hero, Prospero. In charting the psychoanalytical struggle between Felix’s ongoing struggle to relinquish control, Atwood re-invigorates Shakespeare’s critique of authority by foregrounding the psychological and ethical cost of domination, perpetuating the torment of one’s conscience. Through this rich textual conversation between Atwood and Shakespeare, we are invited to reconsider Shakespeare’s commentary that true power is derived not from status, but rather, from the reclamation of moral agency – thus transcending the enduring paradox of control beyond the contextual confines of the Jacobean era. 

In transforming her tragic hero, Felix, from vengeful director to reconciled creator, emblematic of the complexity presented by post-modern Freudian psychoanalytic thought, Atwood to a great extent makes audiences interrogate the inherent fragility of unmediated control when driven by the unconscious forces of loss. In doing so, she transcends Shakespeare’s masterful negotiation between the desire to exercise authority and the inherent abuse of power driven by Machiavellian pursuits of revenge. Through non-linear, self-reflexive narration, Atwood emulates Shakespeare’s analepsis of ‘Dark Backward’, placing a psychoanalytical lens on usurpation through Freudian psychology, intervening with Shakespeare’s characterisation of Prospero’s downfall as being “rapt in secret studies” – neglecting his role as the Duke of Milan. Opening in the anti-masque by employing pathetic fallacy of the titular motif, “a tempestuous noise of thunder and lightning”, Shakespeare indicates an inversion of traditional systems of order governing the Jacobean era, most notably, the Great Chain of Being to suggest their inherent instability. In further extending the tension between the masque and anti-masque, a courtly form of the Renaissance era sponsored by monarchs to legitimise absolute power, Shakespeare dramatizes the fragility of Prospero’s control as “a prince of power”. Transcending Shakespeare’s perennially relevant critique of the precarious nature of control, Atwood dissonantly frames Felix’s dominion not as divinely sanctioned by doctrines of the Divine Right of Kings, but as a fragile psychological construct rooted in trauma – what Freud posits as ‘ego-defence’. Despite her disparate context, Atwood reframes the illusory nature of control and power by intertextually transforming the motif of the 9^th prison, “the thing of darkness” – the psychological cell of grief and revenge, breeding his insatiable desire to exercise control thereby concealing his profound trauma. By displacing Shakespeare’s emblem of subjugation in reluctantly acknowledging Caliban, Atwood internalises the symbol further through her subconscious motif of Miranda. Reflecting the socio-cultural shift presented by third-wave feminism, Atwood inverts the imbalanced power dynamic shown in the irony of, “this one was silent, obedient”. While manifesting as an intangible hallucination, the subconscious Miranda acts as the repressed conscience dictating Felix’s psyche, dissonant to Shakespeare’s Miranda – a passive object of patriarchal control. By intertextually colliding with the former text, Atwood suggests the pursuit of control over one’s inner world ultimately engenders psychological imprisonment upon self. 

Despite her disparate post-colonial context, Atwood to a great extent positions us to interrogate the universal notion that control is contingent on subjugation, first posited by Shakespeare. As such, the intertextual conversation between Atwood and Shakespeare masterfully examines Prospero and Felix’s dominance over their intermediaries, justifying their Machiavellian weaponisation of power, “which put the ends before the means to the point of condoning acts of betrayal” (Cardoner, 2005) to pursue revenge. In dissonantly transforming The Tempest’s Ariel, a submissive androgynous air spirit, into the imprisoned collective and 8Handz, Atwood decentralises the singularity of Felix’s control. Yet this illusion of collaboration is destabilised as Felix employs 8Handz as a conduit for vengeance, relying upon “digital phantoms” and “hallucinatory projections” – a product of the 21^st century’s rapidly increasing trajectory of digitisation. In creating resonance with Shakespeare through the control each protagonist exacts over their theatrical productions with authoritarian precision, exploiting the intermediaries of Ariel and 8Handz as “brave spirits” of servitude, tantalised by the promise of “liberty” and “early parole” by satisfying their master’s pursuit of revenge. The metatheatricality Atwood employs, sustained through myse-en-abyme, reframes Prospero’s infallible control “on the top, invisible”  – thereby positioning us to reconsider Shakespeare’s construction of omnipotence as illusory. In presenting a vision of ‘theatrum mundi’, by which Felix orchestrates the ability to “see without being seen”, an ironic affirmation of his insatiable desire for omniscient control by retreating to surveillance, Atwood transcends the artificiality of human control by echoing post-modern anxieties between performative authority and authentic agency. Shown through the satirical accumulation of, “Eye of newt. Ketamine. Salvia. Mushrooms. Awesome stuff”, Atwood collapses the illusion of control into the materiality of drug-induced manipulation, revitalising Shakespeare’s concern to a great extent of the ethical implications of control as a morally costly act. In doing so, the rich dialogue facilitated between both composers compels us to acknowledge the pursuit of omnipotence, no matter how theatrically justified, inevitably reduces others to instruments. While Atwood leaves the anti-masque unresolved to render the paradox of control as a fragile theatrical construct, Shakespeare employs metatheatrical imagery in the tragicomedy’s closing soliloquy, “… the great globe itself… shall dissolve” to resolve the anti-masque. In dismantling the foundations of Prospero’s control, Shakespeare’s epilogue transforms his renunciation into a confrontation of ethical reckoning – a notion which Atwood extends upon further in light of her morally relative 21^st century. Thus, to a great extent, does Atwood reposition us to interrogate Shakespeare’s commentary on control as a paradox; inherently fragile and sustained through subordination. 

Furthermore, Atwood to a great extent repositions us to consider Shakespeare’s celebration of the arts’ power  to catalyse individual transformation – achieved by relinquishing control and actively engaging in the struggle for reconciliation. Responding to her post-modern context’s democratisation of the arts, Atwood revitalises the power of the arts to liberate one from the perpetual cycle that lust for control drives by adapting the tragicomedy’s Green World. In seeking to transcend Gonzalo’s vision of a moral utopia shown in the use of asyndeton in “contrast/succession/bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard – none”, Shakespeare intertextually appropriates the Green World from Thomas Moore’s 1516 socio-political satire, Utopia as a liminal realm bereft of artificial confines thus activating the possibility for individual redemption. Whilst dissonantly constructed, Atwood’s Green World, “where you’re meant to learn something”, reframes the purgatorial connotations of Jacobean Christianity within the liminal space of Fletcher Correctional Centre to align with her increasingly secular zeitgeist. In mimetically adapting the Shakespeare Behind Bars program operating within restorative justice reforms in Canada which mandate literature and education for incarcerated individuals as an effective means of reducing recidivism, Atwood offers a greater degree of verisimilitude than the hypotext in order to champion the pursuit of mercy as an enduring struggle rooted in the relinquishment of control. Rather than a metaphysical realm governed by divine providence, the prison serves as a democratised site of catharsis – thus allowing Atwood revitalises Shakespeare’s latent assertion: that the greatest act of power is not control, but release and mercy. Paradoxically, Prospero’s mercy not prompted by Christian providentialism but rather, through Ariel – a non human entity’s plea, “Mine would, sir, were I human”. In reframing reconciliation as an act of shared humanity, Atwood’s 8Handz’s question, “Don’t you feel sorry for them?” confronts Felix with a similar ethical confrontation, thus creating resonance with Shakespeare by suggesting that true transformation arises from championing the values of conscience. Shaped by her post-modern context’s influence of moral ambiguity, Atwood seeks to reconcile Prospero’s inauthentic, morally simplistic anagnorisis -  that the “rarer action is in virtue than in vengeance” by subjecting Felix to a more psychologically rigorous process of self-control.  Extending upon Prospero’s final plea, “let your indulgence set me free”, where Shakespeare suggests that true power lies in vulnerability, Atwood recontextualises this renunciation by ins erting the post-modern innovation of the epilogue, ‘Set Me Free’, – thus making us, to a great extent, question Shakespeare in that true control is derived from reconciling self. In his oscillation between vindictiveness and remorse shown in his admission, “It’s always revenge, revenge, revenge… I can’t seem to stop”, Atwood challenges Shakespeare’s linear moral awakening, rather granting Felix the opportunity to articulate his own closure through persistent struggle. Thus, the epilogue’s intertextual pastiche of “to the elements be free” renews emotional healing and the absolute relinquish of control, liberating Prospero from the imprisonment of grief.

Ultimately, to a great extent does our engagement with Atwood’s Hagseed invite us to deeply re-examine Shakespeare’s celebration of the arts in evoking human qualities of forgiveness and conscience, when individuals relinquish their individual desire for control. Despite their disparate contexts situated within the rigid Jacobean hierarchy and Atwood’s contrasting post-modern psychoanalytic landscape, both composers dialogue on the paradox of human control. In doing so, the textual conversation serves as a powerful catalyst for moral restoration by providing ontological truths surrounding the illusive nature of control and art’s redemptive possibility. 

🔥 Overall Marker Feedback

The response demonstrates perceptive understanding of how Atwood reimagines Shakespeare’s treatment of authority and moral agency. The student clearly frames their argument around the question provided, hence there is a genuine and masterful interaction with it. Analysis is cohesive and sustained across the entirety of the essay, as is the highly conceptual thesis, integration of context and comparison between texts. The student’s skilful handling of form and strong control of academic register and metalanguage elevate the piece further.

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