‘It was about reclaiming Shakespeare’ Dame Harriet Walter in conversation with Thangam Debbonaire

‘It was a mechanism for exploring questions I’ve got about being a woman,’ says Dame Harriet Walter of her book, She Speaks! What Shakespeare’s Women Might Have Said, in which, using her experience as a Shakespearean actor, she gives voice to what she imagines the women in his plays wanted to say.

Through these characters, she explores various aspects of womanhood: motherhood through Juliet’s Nurse, virginity through Cressida, and marriage through Gertrude. While acknowledging that she is writing from a modern perspective, Walter stays true to Shakespeare’s characterisation, explaining that in the case of Cressida, she was intrigued by the shift in her character part way through the play. She says that writing the poem was an attempt to understand ‘what Shakespeare is trying to say. He absolutely loves Cressida […] and then he kind of abandons her,’ noting that while Cressida speaks directly to the audience in the first part, they only hear about the breakdown of her relationship from Troilus, her lover.

Similar character arcs are common for Shakespeare’s women, and Walter goes on to say that while Shakespeare shows that he understands women and the difficulties they faced, at the end of his plays they have all gone ‘back in the box,’ in most cases subsumed by marriage, or by death. She suggests that this was because the female parts were acted by men, who didn’t challenge the portrayal of women.

 So, will Walter’s version of these characters ever appear on stage? She thinks not. It is better to keep the original play but look at it ‘from the female point of view,’ she says. Shakespeare is so large a part of our shared culture, but that culture has long been male-centric. Walter hopes that with new perspectives on Shakespeare, he can become truly shared between both men and women.