Harriet Walter's 'She Speaks! what Shakespeare's women might have said'

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You wait decades for highly enjoyable books by actors about Shakespeare’s female roles, and then two come long in quick succession.

One of my choices in Books of 2024 was Judi Dench’s Shakespeare, the man who pays the rent, in which she talked to Brendan O’Hea about her experiences playing so many parts over so many years.  Dench is now 90, whereas Harriet Walter at 74 is in another generation, but they have played many of the same parts. As Walter points out in She Speaks! What Shakespeare’s women might have said, at a certain age female performers have far fewer choices. Whereas their male counterparts can move on from Macbeth, the younger Hamlet and Romeo to Lear, Duncan and the ghost Hamlet,

If we are lucky we get to Cleopatra (in real life thirty-nine when she died) and kind of fall off the cliff. Yes, it is now accepted for us to play the male roles in Shakespeare, and that is wonderful, but it doesn’t cover the lack of representation of older women, wives and mothers in the classical repertoire.

And as she says, the female character with the biggest part in the plays is Rosalind from As You Like It, who appears in the list as a lowly 15th (Lady Macbeth is 138th - what an impact in such little time).

The main difference between the two books is that Walter, in 30 snappy chapters, on characters from Charmian to Mistress to Quickly to Gertrude and more, takes on the voices of the women themselves, in a series of verse representations. These are often entertaining, and sometimes touching, and on occasion reminded me of the delightful facility with which the poet Patience Agbabi wrote her version of The Canterbury Tales, Telling Tales. Walter is not at that level as a writer, but her touch is light, and her insights are informed by deep experience of playing these roles (in a small number of cases she didn’t do so, and those entries are also interesting as explorations from the outside). The range of poetry is considerable - sonnets, rap, rhyming couplets, blank verse and more - and quite often lines from one play turn up in the pieces by women from another. As Professor Emma Smith wrote in her Guardian review,

The pleasure of this collection is the display of a deeply Shakespearean allusive facility that draws effortlessly on a long career of actorly absorption.

There is not just variety of form, but also of mood. A touching example is Desdemona:

I want to get behind Desdemona’s eyes as she realises Othello is about to kill her. I want to be put back in touch with the love that existed between these two people before it was taken over by manipulators and intruders, judges and critics. I want to imagine those last seconds when Desdemona might try to pull Othello back to that original love. I want to look at that unthinkable moment when her lover becomes a stranger and then a murderer. 

In Harriet Walter’s imagination, Desdemona’s final words are

I catch my breath, succumbing to your might.

I just woke up as you put out my light.

Desdemona never gets the chance to say any more. Other characters are given a chance to express themselves here, like the Motherless Daughters such as Miranda, Cordelia and Portia in a kind of support group, sitting round in a circle sharing their common feelings. The first time Walter takes the voice of Gertrude, it is on what she ‘wanted to say’ (to her son), and the second time it is what she ‘couldn’t say’ (about the grim reality of Ophelia’s drowning rather than the gentle beauty of the Millais vision).

There are many insights here not just into characters but into the acting process, and Shakespeare’s methods. In looking at Isabella from Measure for Measure Walter points out that

So much of how a Shakespeare speech (and therefore character) works is through argument. Even a soliloquy is an argument of sorts … A character posits a problem - an immediate reaction to something that has happened. Then they wrestle with that problem and argue with themselves until they come to some kind of resolution which tilts the play forward into the next action. Holding on to the argument is a safeguard against a generalised wash of emotion … Argument is muscular and skeletal. Poetry is not high-flown language for its own sake but a precise selection of words and imagery that serve an argument. No word in Shakespeare is wasted or unspecific.

And on nothing being wasted, here is her statement on Cordelia:

She is a warrior, nurse and herbalist all in one. She deserves her own play.

The title of the book comes from the so-called balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet (there’s actually no balcony, unless you visit the tacky modern tourist version in Verona). After Romeo’s lengthy speech starting But soft! What light through your window breaks? Juliet says to the night

Ay me.

At which point Romeo says She speaks and then proceeds to talk yet more about this bright angel. Harriet Walter’s imaginings give a lot more space to her protagonists, who are, in this book, entirely real women.

Below, Harriet Walter herself speaks, discussing the book and reading some of the monologues, on the Weirdo’s Book Club podcast, recorded live at the London Literature Festival (h/t to Elaine Dobbin for the spot).