“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 and running through September 6, 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. At the same time, her track record in non-Shakespearean roles, feature films, and prestige television series puts her in the winner’s circle of Dames Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, and Helen Mirren.
“Perhaps the most important pronoun is the unifying We,” Walter has written. A committed feminist but no flamethrower, she acknowledges an “illiberal” attitude toward the all-male Shakespeare revivals that turn up from time to time, including some she has admired. “Men have so many great roles,” she has said. “Why do they have to take ours?”
Mind you, in Shakespeare’s time, the stage was off limits for women; their characters were played by boys and youths, which may in part explain why even the best pale beside the great characters for men. “Playing Brutus,” Walter notes, “I get to say things like, ‘There is a tide in the affairs of men that taken at the flood leads on to fortune.’ Big conversations about destiny and power and what is right. And what does Portia say? Why are you up at night? You’ve ignored our bed. Please come back. Why don’t you talk to me? I’m your wife. Which is beautifully put and not unrewarding to play. But it places her firmly in the domestic sphere, in relation to the man. And she dies offstage.”
As actors do, Walter thinks hard about what her characters leave unspoken. Working on Lady Macbeth, she poured her observations into a striking neo-Elizabethan double monologue (“Before the Deed” and “After the Deed”). With the encouragement of her publisher, many more such texts have followed. Walter’s recent anthology, She Speaks! What Shakespeare’s Women Might Have Said (2024), fills in blanks for Kate the Shrew, the Three Witches, Miranda, the Dark Lady of the Sonnets, Anne Hathaway, and many others. (The title of the book echoes Romeo, gazing unseen at Juliet on her balcony.) Already Walter has been trying out the material in performance with colleagues such as Olivia Williams and Juliet Stevenson.
Bearing in mind age-defying sensations such as Dench’s Titania at 76 and Siân Phillips’s Juliet, also at 76, how tempting might Walter find Hamlet? During the pandemic, Ian McKellen tackled that Everest for the third time—at 82.
“We have endless Hamlets,” Walter says, “and you could argue, Why do we need your Hamlet? Why do you need my Hamlet? Hamlet is not a one-man show. Like all Shakespeare’s plays, it’s a play about community and a reflection of the society that is watching. If it just becomes a showcase to prove that a particular actor can do Hamlet, it becomes embarrassing. I’ve seen it happen.”
As You Like It is on at the Theatre Royal Bath, in England, until September 6
Matthew Gurewitsch writes about opera and classical music for AIR MAIL. He lives in Hawaii
