An actor’s collection of supplementary speeches for Shakespeare’s female characters offers fresh insights into his work

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).