She Speaks! by Harriet Walter review – new words for Shakespeare’s women

Harriet Walter takes the title of her book from Romeo and Juliet. Spying Juliet at her window after the Capulet ball, Romeo fervently describes her expressive form: “she speaks”. The next phrase is, however, the more telling: “yet she says nothing”. It’s not literally true: Juliet does speak, famously, of her impatient desire and her willingness to submit herself to near-death for her love, but like almost all other Shakespeare heroines, she does it less than her male counterparts.

Only in Rosalind, the spirited heroine of As You Like It, striding around the Forest of Arden in doublet and hose and flirting with men and women alike, is there a Shakespearean female character who has the lioness’s share of the play’s lines. More often, women watch, silent. Hamlet’s mother Gertrude, for instance, is on stage for almost half the play but speaks one line to every 10 from her garrulous son, who nevertheless has the gall to describe his own excessive speech as “like a drab” (whore).

Walter, who has played more than a score of Shakespearean roles from Viola to Brutus, admits “I worship Shakespeare”. She nevertheless wants to take him to task for the limitations on his insights into women and women’s lives. Her book provides a series of supplementary speeches, mostly in rhyming iambic pentameter, introduced with brief but revealing snippets of her own connection to the characters across her career. In The Turning of the Shrew, she has Shakespeare’s “tamed” Katherine confront an imagined audience and ask “Whose side are you on, ladies?” Walter ranges from cheerily calling out Bianca’s “anger issues” and questioning her marriage to “that wanker”, to the sharper recognition of anyone “whose husband knows just where to hide a bruise”.

A funny colloquy of motherless daughters all point out moments where ‘I missed a mum’ and urge writers to include maternal figures in their plays

These speeches often propose brilliant alternative insights, female perspectives on familiar stories. Gertrude tries to tell her son about his father’s true character, confesses that she was always in love with his brother, and boxes his ears for his unthinking misogyny: “You’re wrong to think that sex begins to pall: / The blood at our age has not cooled at all”. Olivia recognises the femininity behind Cesario’s male costume, and while she is troubled by her feelings lest “all the world should think I am a le-”, she decides to pursue their exciting possibilities. Cressida produces a powerful sequence from the margins of the Trojan war. Much Ado’s quiet Hero puns “to me my name is Will-ful irony”; Hermione, another woman almost destroyed by male jealousy, enjoys herself: “Polixenes is fun, I’ll not pretend”.

Confronted with one of the most famous silences in the canon, Isabella’s non-reply to the Duke’s proposal of marriage at the end of Measure for Measure, Walter swerves to choose a different emphasis. Shakespeare’s devastatingly short exchange, when Isabella threatens to reveal her violator and Angelo replies “who will believe thee, Isabel?” is here expanded into a transhistorical soliloquy addressed to modern audiences “who will believe my story”. The poem ends with an evocation that is part Viola offering to build a willow cabin at Olivia’s gate, part Lear in the storm, and part sonnet 29 troubling “deaf heaven with my bootless cries”. The pleasure of this collection is the display of a deeply Shakespearean allusive facility that draws effortlessly on a long career of actorly absorption.

Putting women, often isolated within their plays, into conversation makes for some telling juxtapositions in a dialogue between Hermione and Cymbeline’s Imogen. A funny colloquy of motherless daughters all point out moments in their plots where “I missed a mum” and urge writers to include maternal figures in future plays. The speeches tend to the rollicking. Rhyme is relatively easy to write, but sometimes its tendency to produce humorous effect ill serves the dramatic moment. Lady Macbeth’s close couplets sound some poignant thematic echoes – unravelled /travelled, frayed / wade, deed / bleed – but approach bathos at “relegated to the role of nagger, / I could not tell you, ‘That is not a dagger’”. There’s a reason Shakespeare himself moved towards blank – that is, unrhymed – verse.

The title phrase “she speaks” is actually repeated at Romeo’s meeting with Juliet (as Walter’s Nurse reports, Shakespeare “never specified a balcony”). At first we get the paradox of saying nothing. But when his beloved does indeed give voice, Romeo returns, “O, speak again, bright angel”. It was a staple of Shakespeare’s grammar school education that boys learned rhetoric through the technique known as prosopopoeia: giving speech to the dead, or to objects, or to the mute, in order to stir emotion. Walter’s acts of modern prosopopoeia continue this tradition. A wonderful actor here urges her readers to “speak them aloud”: “haply”, as the queen of France recognises at the end of the male-dominated Henry V, “a woman’s voice may do some good”.

• Emma Smith is professor of Shakespeare studies at the University of Oxford. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply.