It has been simmering for years. Long before she was a dame, before she was withering in Succession, had appeared opposite Chewbacca in Star Wars, fat-shamed a baby in Ted Lasso and become one of the few – possibly the only – actor to play both a king and queen of England, Harriet Walter was Ophelia in Richard Eyre’s revelatory 1980 production of Hamlet (the one in which Hamlet ventriloquised the Ghost). Each night she watched from the wings as the prince and his mother had their heated debate: “Jill Bennett’s Gertrude was squirming under Jonathan Pryce’s blast. I used to think: ‘Oh Gertie, get a hold of yourself…’”
Now Walter has written an extraordinary book (her fifth) in which Gertrude, among others, has her say. In spiky Shakespearean verse. She Speaks! brilliantly creates secret lives and new monologues for 30 of Shakespeare’s women – including Anne Hathaway. Ophelia explains that she did not actually drown but faked her death with the help of the grave digger: she ran off to a nunnery and has been whooping it up with some wild sisters. Cleopatra is bored rigid, stuck in heaven with Antony: “Without command and sway and sexual sizzle/ It’s all one dreary democratic drizzle.” Lady Macbeth, who met the witches to suggest that her husband’s ambition needed a bit of a nudge, rhymes “nagger” with “dagger”. Desdemona, most miserably fading of heroines, conjures up the love she shared with Othello and concludes, beautifully and in anguished realisation, with lines that entwine Shakespeare’s own: “I just woke up as you put out my light.”
