‘For Will has held my tongue’

On stage, Harriet Walter always conveys sharp intelligence and humour, which is equally characteristic of her books Other People’s Shoes (1999) and Brutus and Other Heroines (2016). In those books Walter surveys her own career trajectory, contrasting sadly the thinness of its later stages with the rich opportunities remaining for the ageing male actor. In She Speaks!: What Shakespeare’s women might have said, it is not surprising to find Shakespeare’s best-known female characters also complaining that he denies them lines in which to express interiority (as Walter’s Gertrude puts it, “But break my heart for Will has held my tongue”). What is surprising is that they do this in remarkably accomplished and varied verse.

Walter finds blank verse too serious for her, and she is better at rhyme, with a taste for playful ones (“Verona”/“own her”; “scholars”/“solace”). Quatrains are her preferred form, usually smooth, but sometimes, as in her version of Ophelia’s monologue, in half-rhymes. She also deploys rhyming couplets, free verse, songs, sonnets (some attributed to the Dark Lady or to Anne Hathaway Shakespeare), a Brechtian duet for “the Interchangeables” (Diana and Mariana, bed-trick women) and a prose monologue from Mistress Quickly. Walter offers a brief introduction to each character and to their motivations and performance histories. For example, she incorporates Caliban into her selection, explaining “I felt Caliban belonged in this book of female voices, perhaps because, as with Ariel, I cannot shake the image of them as women in a prison”. In her rendition he speaks in pounding internal rhymes, while in the next poem Miranda revels in the brave new world of verse that is free “from the great I-AM-bic./No more ‘I am’/Just Me”. Princess Katherine of France, in franglais, decides she may as well marry “Le Rosbiff King of Angleterre”.

There are some reinventions: Ophelia reveals that she followed Hamlet’s example, faking not only her madness, but also her death, then got her to a lively nunnery full of fallen women. Hermione and Imogen, both unjustly suspected by their husbands, insist on their right to find other men sexually attractive. In the Support Group for Motherless Daughters, Helena of Athens is “quite grateful for Will’s lazy writing”, which, by leaving Demetrius “spellbound still”, gives her a chance of happiness with him.

This “light verse” has its serious moments: Lady Capulet regrets her early marriage and lack of rapport with her daughter; Gertrude admits that she made Ophelia’s hideous drowning sound beautiful for Laertes’s sake and now hates hearing her words spoken “By hopeful students at a drama school”. The “Witches’ Rap”, one of the most powerful poems, harks back to Facing It (2011), Walter’s collection of photographs of older women, accompanied by mini essays and quotations that aim to give them not only respect, but also visibility: “But look at us: we’re OLD”, the witches say. With amusing illus­trations by Kaye Blegvad, this is likely to be a popular gift book, but one that will actually be read with pleasure by its recipients.

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