“All the world’s a stage,” from the wintry pastorale As You Like It, tops many lists of best-loved speeches in the Shakespeare canon. It’s spoken by Jaques, a cranky courtier from the entourage of Duke Senior, living in banishment in the Forest of Arden. As a commentator rather than a player in the main action, he displays intellect, gravitas, and the irony of one who has seen it all. In a new production at the Theatre Royal Bath, directed by Ralph Fiennes, the aquiline Dame Harriet Walter, 74, takes the part and receives star billing. Not that the down-to-earth stage royal visualizes her name spelled out in lights. “Above all, I am an ensemble player,” she told me recently, between rehearsals. “I’m interested in the sum of the parts, exceeding the individual contributions to that sum.” Walter’s book Other People’s Shoes: Thoughts on Acting (1999)—top-notch insights wrapped around a sort of crypto autobiography—lets us in on what it takes to realize that ideal. “I try never to repeat myself,” Walter says as she prepares her non-binary Jaques. “I look at people out and about and wonder what they’re thinking and how they are and who they are and what it’s like to be them. That’s the way my mind works.” With credits that include Ophelia, Viola, Imogen, Lady Macbeth, and Cleopatra, followed by Brutus, Henry IV, and Prospero in Phyllida Lloyd’s iconoclastic all-female trilogy, Walter has inhabited a cross-section of Shakespearean humanity likely unmatched by any actor in history. —Matthew Gurewitsch