View a FREE sample

This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. Who does Anne-Marie say will make the goddesses’ costumes?

2. What is the phrase “scurvy monster” the password for?

3. Who does Prospero need to set him free?

4. How does Felix describe Anne-Marie’s posture when she sits in front of the inmates?

5. What position are Sebert Stanley and Sal O’Nally competing for?

Short Essay Questions

1. How does Felix frame Tony and Sebert?

2. What does Felix say is the ninth prison, which the actors had not identified?

3. How does Felix feel about his play when he is five weeks out?

4. What does Team Hag-Seed say Caliban would have done after the play?

5. What happens to throw WonderBoy and Anne-Marie off their rhythm, after their first successful scene together?

6. What does Felix tell Sal and Tony when he appears to them as himself?

7. What does Felix say was the ultimate goal of staging the Tempest?

8. How do the actors wish each other good luck?

9. What does Felix tell the ministers—and the other inmates and officials in the prison—in order to camouflage his play within a play?

10. What is the news Estelle has to meet Felix suddenly, to tell him?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Who is the audience for Hag-Seed? What is the ideal reader for Hag-Seed likely to think about the book’s main topics? How does this book try to affect the reader? What is it trying to teach him or her, or get him or her to do?

Essay Topic 2

What are the advantages and disadvantages of including so much back story, with Felix being fired from the Makeshiweg Theatre Festival? How does Atwood use this history to establish her characters? What are the dangers of traveling back in time so far, from the present moment where most of the novel’s action takes place? Does Atwood pull it off effectively?

Essay Topic 3

When is Hag-Seed most itself? What is its characteristic passage, or moment? What makes that moment or passage the most representative of the book as a whole? Are there any places where the book seems to depart from its typical self, as if to become a different book?

(see the answer keys)

This section contains 1,033 words (approx. 4 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample