One of the most significant resonances between William Shakespeare's The Tempest (1611) and Margaret Atwood's Hag-Seed (2016) is the exploration of how society constructs and maintains social stigma.
Shakespeare explores stigma through the lens of Jacobean colonial imagination. Caliban is frequently reduced to animalistic or monstrous imagery, a technique known as zoomorphism, to justify his dispossession and enslavement.
Atwood reframes this colonial othering within the contemporary setting of a correctional facility, showing how modern institutional stigma mirrors the dehumanisation of the 17th century.
Both texts represent the difficulty of escaping societal scripts. Atwood uses the postmodern form to provide the marginalised with a collective voice through rap and musical performance.