Harriet Walter: New Words for Shakespeare's Women

Shakespeare’s plays are filled with unforgettable women—but too often, their voices are cut short. Ophelia never gets to defend herself. Gertrude never explains her choices. Lady Anne surrenders to Richard III in silence.

In her new book, She Speaks: What Shakespeare’s Women Might Have Said, acclaimed actor Dame Harriet Walter imagines what those characters might tell us if given the chance. Through original poems, Walter reimagines moments of silence, expands on fleeting lines, and provides depth to women who were left without a final word.

Walter invites us to see Shakespeare’s plays in a new light—reconsidering how we understand his female characters, and how their voices might transform the stories we thought we knew.

Listen to Shakespeare Unlimited on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Spotify, Soundcloud, or your favorite podcast platform.

From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published October 7, 2025. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had help with web production from Paola García Acuña. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. Final mixing services are provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

Dame Harriet Walter, DBE, is one of Britain’s most esteemed Shakespearean actors, whose roles include Ophelia, Viola, Lady Macbeth, Cleopatra, Brutus, King Henry IV, and Prospero, among others.. She has received a Laurence Olivier Award, as well as numerous nominations, including a Tony Award nomination, three Primetime Emmy Awards, and a Screen Actors Guild Award. Walter is also well-known for her appearances in Sense and Sensibility, Atonement, Downton Abbey, The Crown, Succession, Killing Eve, and Ted Lasso, among many other notable projects. In 2011, she was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) for services to drama.

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FARAH KARIM-COOPER: From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited. I’m Farah Karim-Cooper, the Folger director.

[Music fades]

So many of Shakespeare’s female characters leave the stage without getting a chance to really explain themselves.

There’s Isabella’s famous silence at the end of Measure for Measure…

But also, Ophelia never gets to stand up for herself…

…and Gertrude never reveals whether she was in on King Hamlet’s death.

Come to think of it, what does Hermione think about King Leontes’s jealous rage?

And why does Lady Anne go along with Richard III’s attempt to seduce her?

The actor Dame Harriet Walter attempts to answer those questions in her new book She Speaks: What Shakespeare’s Women Might Have Said.

Walter imagines new speeches for these characters, and many more, in rhyming poetry. They draw on Walter’s long career playing—and wondering about—these characters.

The last time Walter joined us on the show, in 2019, she explained that she felt she had reached the end of what Shakespeare had to offer her as a woman actor, until she joined Phyllida Lloyd’s all-female trilogy at the Donmar Warehouse. Walter played Brutus in Lloyd’s Julius Caesar, King Henry in Henry IV, and Prospero in The Tempest. The Guardian would call that series “one of the most important theatrical events of the past 20 years.”

At the time of this interview, Walter was playing Jaques in a production of As You Like It at the Theatre Royal Bath, directed by Ralph Fiennes.

Here’s Dame Harriet Walter, in conversation with Barbara Bogaev.

BARBARA BOGAEV: Harriet Walter, welcome back to the podcast.

HARRIET WALTER: Thank you.

BOGAEV: It’s so great to have you here again. I was hoping we could just start with a reading. Let’s just jump right into Gertrude. Her first speech.

WALTER: Yeah, sure.

BOGAEV: And maybe you could set it up for us?

WALTER: Okay, so this is the very first one I wrote. That was because I was asked to do so in a competition that was set up for school kids.

BOGAEV: Right. You were the mentor, right?

WALTER: Yes. Well, I was a sort of patron of this charity that takes Shakespeare into schools, not as a sort of heavy-duty study. But for them to have fun, and get up on their feet, and play the parts. And feel the sound of the words in their mouth. And understand that these words belong to everybody and it’s not some museum thing.

So, I’m very involved with that group. And they wanted to do this competition for kids to write an alternative Shakespeare piece. Either to create a new character, or bring a well-known character into a different situation, or change the age or the gender or something of a character. And they wanted me to kick it off.

And one of the people that I’ve always wanted to know more about was Gertrude. Because I’d played Ophelia and I’d watched from the wings, as in this case it was Jonathan Price playing a brilliant Hamlet. I would watch every night from the wings.

And I’d watch the actress playing Gertrude and go, “Oh God, why don’t you answer back? He’s just haranguing you, and you don’t get to say anything back. And here’s this rather spoiled sort of adolescent boy telling you you’re not allowed to have sex anymore. And how could you possibly have fallen in love with his uncle rather than his father and blah, blah, blah.”

But of course, it’s the first time she hears that there was a murder involved. So, I basically thought I would respond to all that and write a piece for Gertrude. And I will read it to you now. It’s called “What Gertrude Wanted To Say.”

Oh, and yes, you get bonus points. if you spot sort of twists and turns of well-known Shakespearean phrases because I’ve sort of threaded them through. Okay.

“What Gertrude Wanted To Say.”

[Harriet Walter reads a speech from her book She Speaks! What Shakespeare’s Women Might Have Said (2024), pages 9 – 11]

Oh Hamlet, if you only understood
Your damnèd dad was anything but good.
He was a viper when he went to school.
At home he rampaged like a shackled bull,
Spoiling for wars that meddled with his mind
And made him More despotic and unkind.
He took his violent rages out on me,
Who sheltered you from all this agony.
So you grew up believing him a saint
And I could never say, “A saint he ain’t.”
Admit you rarely saw him. After all,
He oft was busy with some foreign brawl.
Your uncle was my only comforting.
We’d been in love from childhood, but the King
(The old King, your old grandad) and his mare
Insisted that I wed their precious heir.
A marriage of convenience, you see,
But deeply inconvenient for me.
Much more than that, it broke your uncle’s heart
That we were forced to live our lives apart
And now you tell me of this fratricide;
He told me “natural causes,” but he lied.
I see now our unseemly bed was cursed;
I understand you now. So do your worst.
Yet… though I know that what he did was wrong,
Perhaps he hoped the poison was so strong
It painlessly would send the King to sleep,
Leaving no time for counting woolly sheep
But straight knit up the ravelled sleeve of care?
Then we’d be free to wander everywhere
Overtly loving, spend whole days in bed,
Surfeiting those appetites so long unfed.
(You’re wrong to think that sex begins to pall:
The blood at our age has not cooled at all.)
Your father’s ghost torments us even now.
My love for Claud has withered on the bough.
You’ve hurt Ophelia’s feelings and you’ve changed.
I don’t believe you really are deranged,
Just playing for time till everything’s aligned.
But knowing you, you won’t make up your mind
Until the court is poisoned, every one.
Including you, my fallen sparrow son.
But break my heart for Will has held my tongue.

BOGAEV: “My fallen sparrow son.” “The unraveled sleeve of care.” You packed so much into that.

WALTER: Well done. Yeah.

BOGAEV: What a twist on your thinking about Hamlet’s King Hamlet and the relationship between Gertrude and Claudius. Was that something you were thinking way back when?

WALTER: No. I have to admit I cheated. I saw a production where that was the subtext, and I thought it was so powerful. It really helped instead of making the ghosts this lovely person, you know. This hero to Hamlet.

I thought, “Well, it to totally makes sense that Claudius is rather charismatic and pays much more attention to Gertrude. And the Kings always off at wars and isn’t around much.”

Also, it made it perfectly fair to believe that Hamlet would still believe his father was a hero. Because a lot of young boys, particularly if they don’t see their fathers very much, heroize their fathers in absentia.

So, it seemed to make sense to me that just because Hamlet said his father was wonderful. “Hyperion to a Saturn,” and all that. That’s Hamlet’s view. That’s his teenage lens, and he hasn’t dropped it even in early manhood.

BOGAEV: That all makes sense. “You’re wrong to think that sex begins to pall. The blood at our age is not cooled at all.” I think every woman of a certain age in the audience is just silently screaming this when Hamlet mansplains midlife sexuality to his mother. I mean, it’s like screaming back at the television news. That’s really in part what you’re doing with this book, right?

WALTER: Thank you. That’s a very good way of putting it. I’m screaming back at the television news. Exactly.

BOGAEV: I mean, the other thing that’s interesting is that you have two Gertrude speeches. Because Gertrude in Hamlet, Gertrude only has one big speech.

WALTER: That’s right.

BOGAEV: It’s her rather flowery description of Ophelia’s drowning. Beautiful poetry, but very romanticized.

WALTER: Exactly. That, again, was somebody who’s directed the play, taught the play, alerted me to the fact that that speech is there. Not just to be beautiful and lovely and be a drama school audition piece, but because Gertrude is very possibly dressing up the horror of Ophelia’s suicide for the men.

BOGAEV: I mean, she’s softening the blow.

WALTER: She’s softening the blow for Laertes. That seemed to make an awful lot of sense to me.

BOGAEV: Ah, because he just lost his father, too.

WALTER: He’s just lost his father. He’s witnessed his sister having lost her mind. Then he hears that she’s, you know… that’s a lot of news to take in for a couple of hours.

Part of what I’m trying to address is the fact that because—it’s really  because Shakespeare’s so everlasting, that these things become an issue. It’s the fact that he’s still seen as the absolute ultimate articulator of the human condition. That there’s a need to sort of put the female side of things into the picture.

BOGAEV: Yeah. that’s an interesting interpretation because it makes Gertrude into kind of a much more maternal caring figure than she’s usually portrayed.

WALTER: Yes, exactly. She’s sort of rather cold. She sometimes played as sort of in an alcoholic stupor. Because actors, actresses have had to justify the fact that she doesn’t say much, you know?

It’s a peculiar thing. You do want to go back 400 years and say, “William, why didn’t you give her more to say? What do you think is going on in her mind?”

BOGAEV: Which speaks just exactly to your book and to your title, She Speaks. Which comes of course from the Romeo and Juliet, the so-called balcony scene. When Romeo stalks Juliet from the garden below and says,  “She speaks. Yet she says nothing,” which is often played for laughs that line.

WALTER: Yes.

BOGAEV: It reminds me that so often Juliet’s lines are the first to get cut from the play by so many directors, even though she’s the witty, smart one here. I mean, Romeo’s a real dim bulb compared to Juliet.

WALTER: It’s absolutely true.

BOGAEV: Something that you just mentioned in passing in your book about your approach to acting. That when you play a classical part, you try to build a bridge between yourself and the character and form a kind of hybrid, a sort of Harriet Macbeth or whatever. Maybe a Harriet Jaques, or whatever.

WALTER: Yes.

BOGAEV: So, what do you really mean by that hybridization? And is that a way you achieve a kind of authenticity in your performances?

WALTER: I think it’s a strange process that most actors do go through, whether they articulate it that way or not. That, you know, there’s this person that’s been written and created and imagined by somebody else, and you come towards it. And you are supposed to embody it.

It’s like it… I’ve equated it before with, sort of, falling in love. Where you, sort of, merge with the person you’re in love with. You find all the places where boundaries blur with their boundaries. And you look for them because you need to form that relationship.

And similarly, if you’re going to play a character authentically, you want to believe—it sounds self-indulgent, but you want to believe yourself as them. You know, “Have I ever felt like that?” And, “What would I be like if I was wandering around the forest of Arden?”

It expands your imagination. Above all, as I say, it makes you feel authentic, makes you believe in yourself. And when you believe in yourself, you can send it out there to other people.

BOGAEV: So just like when you’re in love, you can’t lose yourself completely in the other person because it’ll all go wrong.

WALTER: Exactly.I’ve equated as well, when you end a character on the last night of a play and you say goodbye to them, you are separating. There’s a period where you feel a bit bereft. Then, if you have to, occasionally in my life, I’ve had to revisit a character that I’ve played before. And it’s a bit like, sort of, meeting an old lover again and saying, “Have we still got anything in common?”

BOGAEV: Because you were such a different person when you played them.

WALTER: Exactly.

BOGAEV: Okay, well, let’s talk about one of your old lovers, Cleopatra. And you say you adored playing her, but you didn’t like her very much.

WALTER: Yes. I mean, I don’t have a lot in common with Cleopatra. So, I did find it quite hard to reach her.

BOGAEV: What didn’t you like in her?

WALTER: It wasn’t so much I didn’t like her. It was that, you know, I suppose there was a barrier up there which was Elizabeth Taylor. And I thought, “Okay, that’s who I grew up thinking Cleopatra was.” She was blousy and manipulative and…

BOGAEV: And pure sex.

WALTER: It was all about her sex drive. And it was all about the magic between her and Richard Burton. And she was kind of used to being waited on hand and foot.

I think Shakespeare’s Cleopatra does have that element of narcissism that I found quite interesting to explore, actually. That became—funny enough, that became a bit of a bridge when I was looking for bridges.

Because I think we all have a certain narcissism in us. It sort of comes from very early childhood. We get feedback from other people as they become our mirrors, our reflections of who we are. It can be very confusing as a child because you get conflicting mirrors.

But Cleopatra is on stage all the time. She’s performing to her servants. She’s performing for Antony. She’s performing for things to get around the world, in her reputation. She’s like a modern-day, sort of, instagramer, really.

BOGAEV: Both of them are, aren’t they? Antony and Cleopatra. They’re so convinced of their own fabulousness.

WALTER: Exactly. And I sort of think—there were two poles to it. On the one hand, there was the way she treats her servants and the high-handedness.

Obviously, Shakespeare makes it comical and it’s delightful to play when she chastises the servant for bringing her the news that Antony’s got married.

Those are sort of wonderful comic opportunities where she behaves outrageously because she’s not getting her way.

There was also quite a touching moment when she is sort of very aware of her fading beauty, which I found a big help. Because I thought if you are, you know, Elizabeth Taylor, and you’ve got him and you’ve got the world in love with you.

That quality you’ve got; that seductive, beautiful, sexual quality that you’ve got is not eternal, and it’s going to go on the turn. And you’re going to end up as poor Elizabeth Taylor did in a wheelchair, you know with all sorts of physical problems.

I thought it’s very, sort of, beautiful the way Shakespeare puts in, “I’m wrinkled deep in time,” and all that. You know, sort of where she’s really got an insecurity about her allure.

In his terms in Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, her allure is completely tied in with her power. And, you know, he’s examining some kind of sexual power rather than what she actually had was a political canniness that meant that she could hold onto an empire. Not just through her sexuality, but through all sorts of other tricks of the trade and survival techniques she had to bring with her from childhood.

Then of course she comes into real high grandeur in act five when she’s no longer got Antony. It’s almost like she comes into her own, and sort of represents Antony and Cleopatra for the world.

What I’ve found, they don’t actually have many scenes on stage together, certainly not alone together. Their great love is sort of taken for granted. It’s built up over the past. But in the present tense of the play, there’s a lot of fragility and frailty.

He’s about to leave to go back to Rome because his wife has died. He comes back married to another wife. You know, it’s quite fragile, their relationship.

What I’ve found helpful was listening to the way he talks about her when she’s not there, and the way she talks about him when he’s not there. And that’s when they beef one another up to practically, you know, gods and goddesses. In how that talking about themselves as a couple when they’re talking to somebody else without the other one there.

BOGAEV: Well, let’s get to the reading. Let’s hear what you wish Cleopatra had said.

WALTER: Well, in this case I was, because each of these poems has a— speeches—has a slightly different mission in life. This one was sort of me wanting to send her up a bit.

Because as we’ve talked about, she and he saw themselves as these sort of… they had a hotline to the gods. After their deaths they were going to be immortalized, and they’d be on their thrones in heaven forever. Do you know?

I had a quick think about whether Cleopatra would really enjoy that. Where she would not have an audience, and she’d be sitting up in the clouds with the man she’d wanted all her life, sort of there and no sort of challenge left for her.

And so I’ve called it, “Another Dreary Day in Heaven.”

[Harriet Walter reads a speech from her book She Speaks! What Shakespeare’s Women Might Have Said (2024), pages 36 – 37]

How tedious this eternity can be
In close proximity with Antony.
Who once crossed mighty oceans in his stride
Now curls up safe and cosy by my side.
In life I longed for him but now . . . ho hum.
As Cressid rightly said, “Things won are done.”
What’s love bereft of parting’s sweetest sorrow,
Without the fear of losing him tomorrow?
My asp bite and his wounds are long since healed
And all our fruits and grapes come ready-peeled.
Without command and sway and sexual sizzle
It’s all one dreary democratic drizzle.
This endless flowing cloudscape is so bland,
My monument has crumbled into sand.
Death killed my rule but not my self-regard:
Without an audience I find life hard.
I miss the thrill of being centre stage,
Where slaves and emp’rors cowered at my rage,
Where Nature’s peaks and troughs, its fires and floods,
Reflected all the grandeur of my moods.
Now from my cloudy cushion I survey
Earth’s pygmy players acting out a play
In which I am portrayed as sly and wilful,
Not as I was, politically skilful.
As I predicted, squeaking Cleopatras
Parade my shame, with shambling hammy partners
Pretending to be Antony, and fail
To match our mythic stature and our scale.
My pride and reputation are at stake—
It took some guts to suckle that damned snake.
I cannot bear to watch as wanton boys
Belittle my brave death with bendy toys.
This Mr. William Shakespeare, who is he
That he will dare to make a fool of me?

BOGAEV: I enjoyed so many lines of that one. “Death killed my rule, but not my self regard. Without an audience, I find life hard.” That probably is the fate of a lot of actors.

WALTER: I think so, yes. Me too come. Yeah.

BOGAEV:  As an audience, as audience members, we want to get behind the characters. I want to talk about Desdemona. Because you said that in writing her speech, you wanted to get behind Desdemona’s eyes, as she realizes Othello is about to kill her. And this is a quote, “At the unthinkable moment, Othello becomes a stranger and then a murderer.”

I think this is so to the point and revelatory really, because as a member of the audience, by this time in the play, I am so focused on Othello that I don’t put myself behind Desdemona’s eyes like this.

WALTER: It’s extraordinary because there are lots of plays in which there’s a victim of jealousy. There’s a woman who’s completely isolated, can’t understand what’s going on, and whose husband wants to kill her.

We’ve got Hermione and Leontes. We’ve even got a Hero and Claudio in Much Ado.

BOGAEV: Imogen in Cymbeline.

WALTER: Yeah. I was trying to get behind that. It just became so clear that it was about—it was the imbalance in a relationship in those days and right through to fairly recently, where a man owned a woman. Therefore, if you own something that somebody else takes away you, you get hostile and angry because it’s theft, you know?

But when your husband suddenly—the person you love suddenly turns around and they’re a stranger to you. It works both ways because he thinks she’s a stranger. He’s suddenly seeing her as this woman who’s betrayed him. Suddenly she becomes a stranger.

I was trying to take it back to what made them love one another in the first place. I was trying to get her to bring him back to, “Don’t you remember those days when we first met and you loved me? How can you possibly switch from that on hearsay?”

Also, for her to look into the eyes of her murderer the last minute. Because I conceive of this… as you know, people say that in the last minutes of your life, your whole life plays out before you. So, this is an exiting line poem, but it’s sort of supposed to take place in a couple of seconds while he’s lowering over her about to smother her.

So, it takes its title from the scene with Emilia, which I refer to, which I love. It’s such a rare scene between two women.

BOGAEV: Rare in Shakespeare.

WALTER: It’s called, “Oh, These Men, These Men!”

[Harriet Walter reads a speech from her book She Speaks! What Shakespeare’s Women Might Have Said (2024), pages 54 – 55]

Unique we were, Othello, you and I,
An “us” we formed together to defy
All preconceptions, jealousies and fools.
I chose you, did the running, broke the rules.
Remember how we whispered by the sea,
Remember how we prized our secrecy?
How equally we felt that loving flood
That forced down dams and mingled in our blood.
Magnetic pulses folded into one,
You were my puma, I your spreading swan.
Would I dismantle that for Cassio?
Who got to you? That’s what I want to know.
How easily the monster took its hold
In your sweet fertile soil and fearful soul.
Your wartime courage drained, you lost your head
And now believe the thing you most do dread.
I thought you knew me, lover, wife and friend.
Your treasured trust I never would misspend.
But poisoned words fed by a fellow man
Convince far more than woman’s actions can.
Emilia hears my song and feeds my flame,
And teaches me that all men are the same.
I catch my breath, succumbing to your might.
I just woke up as you put out my light.

BOGAEV: That last line slays me. Also, “But poisoned words fed by a fellow man convinced far more than woman’s actions can.”

You just laid out all of the ways in which Shakespeare’s, he said, she said record is very bad.

WALTER: Absolutely.

BOGAEV: All of those women. Claudio, and Hermione, and Imogen. They suffer abuse, but no one will believe them. You get into this with a soliloquy for the nun, Isabella,

WALTER: Well, that’s what I find so tantalizing about Shakespeare is that he offers up these very obvious signs that he had great sympathy and empathy for these women. I mean, as Isabella says in his play, “To whom shall I complain? Did I tell this, who would believe me? “

BOGAEV: Right? And the evil villain Angelo says to her, “Who will believe you, Isabella?”

WALTER: Yes, yes, yes.

BOGAEV: “That I’m forcing your hand. That I’m about to rape you.”

WALTER: Exactly. And so, you know, you’re going, “Oh, come on, Shakespeare. You knew. So why aren’t you…” I don’t know.

Anyway, it’s tantalizing. It was great to be able to write this book and get some of this off my chest. I don’t know what he’d think of it, but I like to think he wouldn’t mind.

BOGAEV: I want to pick up on something you said earlier, which was that you, as a very young actor, played Ophelia, and Jonathan Price was a Hamlet. And that, what impressed you so much was that he was so present in every scene. That he listened.

You write that the, “Get thee to a nunnery,” scene between you two was different every time, every night. And that you went to the theater excited about, “Oh, what, what will happen? What will happen now?”

WALTER: Exactly.

BOGAEV: What did you learn from him about how to do that as an actor? How to listen?

WALTER: What I learned, I suppose, was that you need to trust your fellow actor. That, you know, you see some actors who are so frightened to look or listen at another actor because they think they’re going to drown or they’re going to pull them down. Or they’re not going to be able to do the thing they’ve set out to do because they got their map in front of them of where they’d like to go with the scene.

Whereas Jonathan understood that the exciting thing about acting is interacting. I was very inexperienced. It was the first, you know, big deal Shakespeare I was in. In the sense that I’d done stuff in the provinces, but I’d never done anything on the central London stage before with a very high-class cast.

So it was a big revelation to me that you didn’t fix the rhythm of a speech. You could play jazz with it, you know? And that’s what I’ve loved about playing Shakespeare ever since.

BOGAEV: So, have faith in your fellow actors and in yourself, as well?

WALTER: Yeah. Yeah.

BOGAEV: Something you said about what you decided for yourself was that you always kept a core of Ophelia to yourself. What does that mean as an actor to keep that secret?

WALTER: Well, I think some famous actress, like Edith Evans, said, “You’ve always got to have a secret letter in your pocket.” It just gives you a grounding, and an earthing, and a truth that’s interior to you.

Like I was talking earlier about, that hybrid. It means that Harriet Macbeth doesn’t become too Lady Macbeth, that doesn’t lose Harriet. Do you know?

Although you’re not showing or demonstrating Harriet, you are the instrument through which Lady Macbeth is speaking. So, you’ve got your quite private route into that character. You don’t want to be too much… I suppose I’m thinking you don’t want to be too much of a people pleaser. You want to hold onto your truth.

But it’s a great balancing act because if you’re too internal and too secretive and the other actors don’t know the hell who you are or what you’re doing, that’s quite destructive. So, it’s a balancing act.

BOGAEV: Wow. It does sound like walking a fine line. I’m thinking that we never know each other completely as human beings. So, I somehow… that seems to be very—hold very true to me. That the best performance would be true to that.

WALTER: It’s true. If I’d sort of take the analogy of the love affair that I spoke about earlier. You know, of course, you want to merge with your lover, and of course, you want to make a “We” and an “Us.” But you’ve got to keep your “Me,” somewhere protected

BOGAEV: I guess my last question really is whether your long history thinking about Shakespeare and these characters infuses your other roles. I’m thinking in particular of your kind of pseudo-Shakespearean role as the incredibly not maternal mother in Succession. Which is famously an adaptation of Lear.

WALTER: Yeah, I mean the Shakespearean aspect of Succession was not part of our consciousness while we were acting it. What they have in common is King Lear or Logan Roy are kind of inhabiting a world where they think they’re all important. Then of course the fact is that everyone around them is desperate to be accepted by them.

So that’s where you sort of get the twist of Lear where all the daughters are actually wanting their father’s affection and they’ve never been able to have it. So, they’ve gone—they’ve twisted. You know, they’ve become twisted.

I found that the family of Logan Roy had this, you know… I had great sympathy for the children who were horrible human beings by some people’s standards. I probably wouldn’t like to sit down next to them at a meal, but they were children who wanted their parents’ love. You know, you could put it that simply.

Just that was withheld at every point, or it was suddenly given to them and then taken away again. You know? That’s a horrible place to be emotionally. They’ll probably be like that with their children, that’s the trouble.

BOGAEV: Right? The cycle goes on. Well, looking ahead, is Lear next?

WALTER: Oh, no, not that I know of. I mean, if somebody offered it me and the situation was right, and the production was, you know, made some sense, I would.

I mean, I’m very happy doing these, sort of, non-binary characters, really. I played Prospero, almost non-binary. I like to explore that, and I feel very much in my own skin when I’m playing those characters.

BOGAEV: Why?

WALTER: Because I don’t think… I don’t quite know what, who is binary actually.

I mean, I think, you know, I’m a human being and there are lots of things in my conditioning and my upbringing that have led me into female action, thinking female, you know. But there’s a whole lot that is not included in that package that isn’t male either.

So, the trouble with the Shakespeare plays is that they are all, particularly if you are King Lear, you know, it’s about power, of a certain kind of power. And I just think that I don’t know how much I want to rant and rave because I’m losing my power as an old King of Britain. I don’t know how much I can relate to that, you know?

But you know, as an acting task, hell yeah. Give it me.

BOGAEV: Well, I hope you get the chance to do whatever you want with Shakespeare. I’ll just look forward to it. And thank you so much for the book. It was just a delight.

WALTER: Thank you so much.

————-

FARAH KARIM-COOPER: That was Dame Harriet Walter, interviewed by Barbara Bogaev.

She Speaks: What Shakespeare’s Women Might Have Said is out now from Union Square books.

This episode was produced by Matt Frassica and Jenny Lawton. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had technical help from Louis Blatherwick in Bath, England, and Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Our web producer is Paola García Acuña. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

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Until next time, thanks for listening!