With a slight twist, Prospero might be the Grand Inquisitor, torturing people for their own good. If you don’t happen to agree with him – as Caliban doesn’t – you’d call him a tyrant, as Caliban does. That being said, it must also be said that Prospero plays God. Prospero uses his arts – magic arts, arts of illusion – not just for entertainment, though he does some of that as well, but for the purposes of moral and social improvement. At the end, Ariel is set free, everyone sails off to Naples and Prospero steps out of his own play and asks to be released from it: perhaps the most puzzling ending to any Shakespeare play. Meanwhile, Caliban has joined two lowlifes, Trinculo and Stephano – a drunken butler and a jester – and the three of them plan to murder Prospero, but are punished by Prospero’s goblins. His enemies, his one-time helper Gonzalo and Ferdinand, son of Alonso, end up on the island and are manipulated in various magical ways by Prospero, with the upshot that Ferdinand and Miranda fall in love and the enemies are entranced, tortured and, at length, forgiven.

When an auspicious star brings Prospero’s enemies within his reach 12 years later, he raises an illusory tempest with the aid of Ariel. Prospero at first befriends Caliban, but when the creature tries to rape Miranda, Prospero enslaves him with the aid of his magic. They land on an island, already inhabited by a savage creature called Caliban, the son of a dead witch, Sycorax, and the air-spirit Ariel, who was imprisoned by Sycorax in a pine tree. It is the story of a magician and former duke of Milan, Prospero, set afloat with his infant daughter Miranda after being deposed in a coup by his treacherous brother Antonio and Alonso, the king of Naples. Michael Clark as Caliban in Propero’s Books (1991) Photograph: Allstar/Channel 4 The Wizard of Oz is only pretending to be a real magician: really he’s a fraud. And illusionists always have a dubious side to them. All of these figures are illusionists, as artists are. In my book about writers and writing – called, oddly enough, On Writers and Writing – there’s a chapter on the artist as magician and/or impostor called “Prospero, the Wizard of Oz, Mephisto & Co”.

I’d thought about The Tempest before, and written about it as well. It contains a great many unanswered questions as well as several very complex characters, and the challenge of trying to answer the questions and tease out the complexities was part of the attraction. In honour of his 400th anniversary the Hogarth Shakespeare project has invited a number of authors to choose a play and revisit it in the form of a prose novel. And I too have redone Shakespeare, also with odd results. People have been redoing Shakespeare for a long time, often with odd results.

Hag seed by margaret atwood