ALSO BY HARRIET WALTER

Other People’s Shoes:

Thoughts on Acting

Macbeth

(Actors on Shakespeare)

Facing It:

Reflections on Images of Older Women

Brutus and Other Heroines:

Playing Shakespeare’s Roles for Women

SHE SPEAKS!

WHAT SHAKESPEARE’S WOMEN MIGHT HAVE SAID

HARRIET WALTER

Copyright

Published by Virago

ISBN: 978-0-349-01892-8

All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Copyright © Harriet Walter 2024

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Illustrations copyright © Kaye Blegvad 2024

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

Virago Press

Little, Brown Book Group

Carmelite House

50 Victoria Embankment

London EC4Y 0DZ

www.littlebrown.co.uk

www.hachette.co.uk

To so many unheard women’s voices and to one special Guy

She speaks: O, speak again!

Romeo and Juliet

Do you not know I am a woman? When I think, I must speak.

As You Like It

VIOLA:

My father had a daughter loved a man,

As it might be, perhaps, were I a woman,

I should your lordship.

DUKE ORSINO:

And what’s her history?

VIOLA:

A blank, my lord. She never told her love.

Twelfth Night

Introduction

If I could time travel, I would go back to London in the 1590s and early 1600s to see one of Shakespeare’s plays performed by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men or the King’s Men. I am bursting with curiosity to know how they acted in those days and, most especially, since actresses weren’t allowed on the stage for another half century or so, to see how boys and young men portrayed Rosalind, Mistress Quickly, Cleopatra or Lady Macbeth.

Theatre was a relatively new art form to the citizens of London and the city itself was a small place, so the pool of boy actors Shakespeare could draw on wouldn’t have been made up of future Laurence Oliviers and Ian McKellens. For the most part they were probably quite shouty and unsubtle schoolboys, pulling faces and hamming it up. Hamlet’s advice to the travelling players not to ‘saw the air too much’ or ‘tear a passion to tatters’ gives one a bit of a clue as to what Shakespeare himself warned his company against. But he was also aware that high art would be ‘caviar to the general’ and that an average contemporary audience wouldn’t be too concerned about the nuances of acting. It was enough to be in the buzzy atmosphere of a playhouse, being told an exciting story.

This is all speculation. Frustratingly, we will never know the truth. Theatre is an art form that by its very nature insists ‘you had to be there’.

I once read that a young male player would be expected ‘to have a command of rhetoric, to speak well, have good facial expressions and an aliveness of movement’. So I suspect that acting in those days owed more to expert mimicry and physical posturing than anything close to the interiority and authenticity the modern actor is expected to bring to the stage. Did a boy player ask ‘What’s my motivation?’ or have to dredge up some Method-like emotional memory in order to play a part? I rather doubt it.

In the small window between recruitment at about age ten and first beard growth (later than nowadays, so around eighteen), a young actor could become an expert in his field and play girls and women outwardly very convincingly. What they couldn’t do was speak from the experience of being a girl or a woman.

They would never say to Shakespeare, ‘I think Gertrude needs to answer back here’, or ‘Can you give me a bit more of a speech about what Lady Capulet feels about her daughter dying?’, or ‘Can you explain why Lear’s daughters Goneril and Regan are so hateful?’

In this book I have had the temerity to invent some answers to some of these and other questions that the modern actress – and a modern audience – might wish to ask.

I worship Shakespeare and feel very irreverent, shamelessly piggy-backing on his giant shoulders. His psychological insight is second to none. His language is miraculous. His daring with forms and his coinage of some two thousand new words make him a great experimenter. He held ‘the mirror up to Nature’ as no one else before or since. But … being a sixteenth-century man his mirror sometimes gives only a sliver of reflection of women and women’s lives. It is a beautiful sliver but limited in scope.

If Shakespeare wasn’t the Poet for All Time whose truths are held to be eternal, this wouldn’t be too much of a problem, but many of his characters have become almost immortal. Perhaps the most universally famous character in fiction is Hamlet. He has come to represent Everyman. He is the great articulator of the human condition and women as well as men are accustomed to identifying with this Danish prince from a very different time. If we were to swap things round, would men similarly identify with a female character as representative of all humankind?

These are some of the thoughts I had as I pondered the long shadow of Shakespeare’s genius and tried to think of ways to let a little sunlight in on some of his women’s stories. I like to think he wouldn’t mind.

I haven’t tried to imitate him or write in cod Elizabethan language, but I have found a natural and helpful structure in the iambic pentameter – five di-dums to a line (with the occasional trochaic dum-di) – that he used. Paradoxically, I found it easier to write in rhyming couplets or sonnet form than in blank verse (the same number of di-dums, but without the rhymes) because that suddenly looks like serious poetry and leaves my choice of words more exposed somehow. Shakespeare frequently broke his own rules of rhythm and rhyme, but he can get away with it because of the depth of his poetic thinking and dramaturgy.

A large part of the enjoyment of the writing was to find out how much I have absorbed of Shakespeare’s rhythms and imagery simply by dint of having played twenty-one (yes, I counted) of his roles. These characters exist in the framework of the verse. The pulse of their thoughts is laced through their speeches and over five decades of internally listening to them and then speaking those lines out loud, I was excited to find how naturally these invented verses came to me.

Do speak them aloud – if you like that sort of thing. I hope you will enjoy that, and also enjoy being tantalised by the odd phrase or echo that reminds you of some famous line of the Bard’s. These don’t usually come from the play I am dealing with in that chapter: my women borrow from one another and toss imagery between them.

Just as when playing a classical part I try to build a bridge between myself and the character and form a kind of hybrid (a sort of Harriet Macbeth, or whatever), in the same way I have written these speeches in a contemporary language while hoping to remain in character. Some are tragical, some comical, tragical-historical, farcical-historical. Most speak alone but sometimes I bring together women from different plays so they can share and compare their stories.

I was alerted to a list (available on Shakespeareswords.com) of every Shakespeare role ranked by the numbers of lines they speak, from Hamlet, who has the most, to some poor guy called Herbert who only has one line in Richard III. On that list, Rosalind from As You Like It is the longest female role but she is only at number fifteen. Tellingly, there are only fifteen women’s roles listed in the top one hundred (Lady Macbeth is way down at number 138, which makes her lasting impact all the more surprising). In making my choices of who to give voice to, I have tended to focus more on those who don’t get much of a look in or are rather misunderstood than on those to whom Shakespeare has already given a lot to say.

I have also included a few characters that seem to me very gender fluid, and I like to think that Shakespeare, who in his casting could switch a boy to a woman and back again, and play with all the ambiguity in between, would understand.