Brutus and Other Heroines

by Harriet Walter

  or

  If thou dost marry, I’ll give thee this plague for thy dowry: be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny. Get thee to a nunnery, go: farewell.

  Remember that you are in love with the speaker (Hamlet), who has become, in most cultures of the world, the most eloquent voice of humanity’s psychological condition, and imagine being given practically nothing to say in your defence. Knowing, moreover, that ‘the noble’ Hamlet’s treatment of Gertrude is similar, you can see how one starts to wonder whose side Shakespeare is on.

  In fact I have turned down the part of Gertrude more than once because she seems to me to be even more muzzled than Ophelia, who at least breaks out into a form of self-expression in her madness. Gertrude is told by her son that she is too old for sex:

  You cannot call it love for at your age

  The hey-day in the blood is tame, it’s humble

  And waits upon the judgment.

  With these words the child seeks to control the mother. This is a love triangle with an Oedipal slant. Hamlet wishes to kill his rival Claudius for usurping his dead father’s place not only on the throne but also in his mother’s bed. Not able to deal with his own complex emotions, he is vicious and oppressive towards both the women he loves, and in the most famous play in the world the woman’s voice is barely heard.

  So it is that sometimes, while ‘inhabiting’ a Shakespearean heroine, we feel to be on the receiving end of a comment about our own sex that is distancing and alienating. Almost worse are the times when these comments are forced out of our own mouths. We are required to say, for example, as Viola:

  How easy is it for the proper-false

  In women’s waxen hearts to set her forms!

  Alas, our frailty is the cause, not we!

  For such as we are made of, such we be,

  or as Cressida:

  Ah, poor our sex! This fault in us I find,

  The error of our eye directs our mind,

  and even Cleopatra chides herself for being

  No more but e’en a woman.

  With these self-condemnatory words, we and our characters are made to endorse a negative male attitude which is never quite disowned by Shakespeare himself.

  Maybe I should give him a break here. In As You Like It (1599) the older male cynic, Jacques, is marginalised at the end and Shakespeare seems genuinely to love Rosalind. Likewise in Twelfth Night (1601) he spreads his gentle ridiculing of the madness of love even-handedly between both sexes and gives Viola the voice of insight among the self-deluded. She is the fresh breath of air in a pit of insanity. She has the audience’s ear and they are always on her side. One feels Shakespeare’s approval carrying her along.

  In Twelfth Night, Shakespeare reaches a kind of apotheosis in his expression of sexual ambiguity. It is not so much a case of a love triangle as of several overlapping and contiguous love triangles. Viola is in love with Orsino and, disguised as his page Cesario, she must woo her own rival, Olivia; Olivia falls for the ‘boy’ Cesario and meanwhile Orsino, who is supposed to be in love with Olivia, must face his ambi-sexual attraction to his page. The play is often blissfully funny. It is painful and perfect.

  I wasn’t thinking along those lines at the time, but the paradox is that as the disguised Viola I was acting out the young man in the triangular tussle between an older man (Orsino), a young man (Cesario), and a woman (Olivia). I even spoke lines that echo the recurrent theme of the Sonnets when Viola/Cesario chastises Olivia with

  Lady, you are the cruellest she alive

  If you will lead these graces to the grave

  And leave the world no copy.

  The beauty of it is that Viola uses her insight into the female condition to get close to Olivia, and it is that which draws Olivia to fall in love with her. Viola is the catalyst by which Orsino shifts from his unrequited objectifying and idolisation of Olivia to a more open-eyed mature love for Viola. That this transition has to be worked through the agency of a boy catalyst is a bittersweet solution. Having acted out a kind of man-to-man intimacy, Viola has had a privileged glimpse into the male world and knows Orsino thoroughly. Orsino looks at women with a fresh eye on learning that the boy he favoured and confided in was actually a woman. A real woman. By becoming her own rival in the guise of a young man, the woman achieves her love, and despite an unresolved twinge of pain, with Viola knowing Orsino almost too well, this marriage looks to be set fairer than most.

  Helena in All’s Well That Ends Well (written around 1604) is caught up in a rivalry with Parolles for the love of Bertram. It is hard to know where Shakespeare stands on any of these characters. He makes Helena a bit of an oddball, and shows little sympathy for either of the men in the love triangle. Bertram is an arrogant, privileged young pup, while Parolles, his best friend and accomplice in deserting Helena, while enjoying the audience’s affection and laughter for much of the play, is finally shown up as a shallow swindler. With all the more revered and upright characters—the Countess, the King, Lafeu the old courtier, and even the Fool, not to mention all the characters she meets in Italy—endorsing Helena’s cause and expressing approval of her character, it would seem that Shakespeare himself was on her side.

  To inhabit a character created by Shakespeare is a curious experience. To begin with, there is the inescapable fact that he never intended a woman to play the role, and, as I mentioned earlier, there is sometimes a feeling of discomfort at inhabiting the object of misogyny where presumably a boy player would have felt none.

  There is one scene in All’s Well, for example, in which Parolles speaks to Helena with a disinhibited crudeness quite unlike any other I can think of outside the brothels of Measure for Measure or the Boar’s Head in Cheapside. Perhaps because Helena is not well-born herself, Parolles feels he can speak to her with an indelicacy he would not have used with a noblewoman. He tells her, for instance, that

  Virginity breeds mites, much like a cheese; consumes itself to the very paring, and so dies with feeding his own stomach… Keep it not: you cannot choose but lose by it.

  He continues:

  Virginity is like one of our French withered pears, it looks ill, it eats drily; marry ’tis a withered pear. Will you anything with it?

  Helena is not devoid of quips and parries to Parolles’s digs against her virginity, but to sit and listen to such lines one feels with the character: mocked, insulted and dirty. On the other hand, one can also feel in a strange way to be more equal, let in on the secrets of a club, albeit a pretty horrible one. From one of his closest associates, Helena is being educated as to the male ethos which Bertram is a part of, and it is all useful stuff to a relatively sheltered girl.

  Eventually Parolles is exposed as a coward in a scene which completely opens Bertram’s eyes as to the true nature of the man he has been emulating, and from this point onwards, uncoupled from his blokeish partnership, Bertram is set free on the long (and still tricky) path to redemption and into the arms of his loving wife.

  Imogen in Cymbeline (1610) falls victim to Iachimo’s desire to drive a wedge between a man and a wife, for who knows what personal reasons of his own. The name Iachimo shares its etymological root with that of Iago in Othello (1603/4), a fellow destroyer of marriage whose motives we never learn.

  Neither man is indifferent to the goodness and beauty of the woman they are intent on destroying. Indeed they seem to be partly in love with them. Unlike Desdemona, Imogen survives to live with and digest the misogyny which the plot exposes in her husband’s heart. Like her, we are left with the question: How could Posthumus so easily believe the worst of his wife and decide to have her killed without ever giving her the chance to defend herself? And what motivates Iachimo? He has nothing personal against Imogen, never having met her when he forges his plan, and he barely knows Posthumus. One asks the same questions in the Othello/Iago/Desdemona triangle and to some extent in the Polixenes/Leontes/Hermione triangle in The Winter’s Tale (1611).

  The answers
must lie somewhere in the mutual ignorance of men and women as to the nature of the other. The physical attraction or biological compulsion towards someone one barely understands, leaves great opportunity for suspicion, and for the projection of one’s own self-hatred on to the ‘other’. The man can too easily blame the woman for his uncomfortable feeling of powerlessness.

  Mutual mistrust is central to the relationship of Antony and Cleopatra, and one could say that Enobarbus makes up a third in the triangle. He is the mediator who loves Antony and is possibly in love with Cleopatra, but is in competition with her for Antony’s soul. In many ways they are mirror images of one another. Both love the powerful Antony, both witness his deterioration with sadness, one deserts him and one has a mind to.

  Enobarbus is a shrewd social observer and the chronicler of his age, a satirist who often expresses the misogyny of the times and of an army man. ‘Between them [women] and a great cause, they should be esteemed “nothing”.’ But he is also a wise and broadminded man who finds Cleopatra infuriating but captivating and understands her in a way that Antony doesn’t quite.

  Enobarbus is one of my favourite characters and perhaps—as Cleopatra, as an actor, and even as a woman—I find that I want his approval.

  I want Shakespeare’s approval, too. Shakespeare is supposed to be invisible and undetectable within the lines of his plays, but just occasionally when you speak his lines in character, you feel you almost know the man and inevitably want to know him better.

  I am trying to resist the too definitive idea that the ‘real’ Shakespeare is to be found in the Sonnets. We must allow him his shifts in attitude, his ambivalence, the changes of heart that we all experience as we grow older (‘A man loves the meat in his youth that he cannot endure in his age’), and so I have to lay aside my aching curiosity and accept that I can never know the man whose words I (mostly) love to speak and hear.

  CLEOPATRA

  The Consummate Actress

  As Cleopatra

  Antony and Cleopatra

  Royal Shakespeare Company, 2006

  I wrote this chapter recently with the benefit of ten years’ hindsight. It was a welcome opportunity to revisit this extraordinary woman.

  The Daunting Task

  Cleopatra is the pinnacle of the female actor’s Shakespearean repertoire. We do not have the male actor’s lifespan from Romeo to Hamlet, Macbeth, Timon and King Lear. Cleopatra is the end of our road, and she died aged 39.

  I had had a break from the RSC through the 1990s and had been acting in modern plays, on television and in films, but by 1999, with the offer of playing Lady Macbeth, my appetite for Shakespeare had returned. After the intensity of Lady Macbeth I relished the lightness of Beatrice, which I went on to play a few years later, and both these parts expressed some part of myself. But where to go next? There was only Cleopatra left to truly challenge and advance me further, but I didn’t feel drawn to her, and I didn’t feel any connection with her. So I had never put myself forward to try her, and had even turned down the role not long before I finally accepted Greg Doran’s offer to play her at the RSC in 2006.

  What changed me? It was mainly the trust I had built up with Greg. He is the most unfussy director, who builds everything from the text and imposes no tricks or conceits that are not supported by the clues and givens in Shakespeare’s language. So I put my first toe in the Nile, so to speak, by saying yes to Greg. But then there was the problem of who would play Antony.

  There are some parts that male actors shy away from because they have a reputation for being unrewarding or dull. Given the choice (and male actors do have the choice) they would rather not play what they perceive as a supporting role to a more eye-catching female role. One actor I asked to play Judge Brack to my Hedda Gabler turned it down because ‘It’s her play’. At least he was honest. (If women had that luxury, we might turn down Lady Macbeth, Gertrude or Goneril because ‘It’s his play’.) Luckily some actors have more sense, and I have been blessed with some great acting partners: one of the greatest was Patrick Stewart, who positively wanted to play Antony.

  Patrick had played Enobarbus a couple of times, a part that is sometimes thought to be the best male role in the play. By playing the character who best understands Antony, he had gained insights into the part, and now, after years of Hollywood stardom, he saw a chance to get back to Shakespeare and play a role he had developed an ambition to perform. Luckily for me.

  How do you approach playing a woman who reputedly stops the heart and eclipses the reason of every man she meets? Who has Julius Caesar eating out of the palm of her hand? To me Cleopatra was Elizabeth Taylor, Ava Gardner, Mata Hari, the erotic, black-eyed woman on Edwardian postcards, impossible for me to get near. However, once I did my research, I found that nowhere in the play or in any historical account is Cleopatra described as beautiful. In fact any existing images of her make her look rather heavy-browed and long-nosed. Hooray! Yes, but on second thoughts not hooray because that meant she managed to pull the men despite not being beautiful. That means she possessed some indefinable sexual ingredient, the X-factor which you either have or have not got and which is something beyond the art of acting.

  What I did have were Shakespeare’s words, and they became my largest sexual attribute. They say the brain is the largest sex organ in the body, and her words were of infinite variety. Playful, grandiose, self-dramatising, switchback, heart-breaking, infuriating and unpredictable. I knew that my best chance of convincing an audience that men might fall at my Cleopatra’s feet would be to get behind those words, the switches of mood, the reach of her imagery, the energy and the emotion to be inferred from her rhythms. And if I could bring all that off the page and on to the stage, I wouldn’t need to fulfil every man’s fantasy with my physique or some ‘X’ ingredient. Getting behind those words would be a tough enough task, but at least it was one that could be worked at, whereas one’s physical attributes are more immutable.

  What I also had was the real experience of a woman on the cusp of old age, with all the contradictions that presents. On the one hand still in touch with a youthful energy and physicality, and on the other the consciousness that, as I joked at the time, ‘this may be the last time I play the love interest’. Both Patrick and I are fairly fit and athletic—which I am rarely required to demonstrate—so we both used that quality of physical energy and enjoyment wherever we could, and indeed I haven’t had and don’t expect to have another chance to run around the stage barefoot or ever again to leap into a stage lover’s arms.

  In Love with Love

  I shall see

  Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness

  I’ the posture of a whore.

  Cleopatra knows that plays will be written about her, and she wants to be in control of the record of her life. It is often the case with Shakespeare’s heroes and heroines that they are self-consciously acting out their own story. Nowhere is this more the case than in Antony and Cleopatra. Both protagonists are in love with their own love story, and they play it out very publicly in front of three layers of audience: the audience of the court and servants on stage with them, the audience who have paid to see the play, and the audience of the gods to whom they feel intimately related and who lend them the importance and consequence that they believe they deserve.

  When we did Macbeth, Greg Doran had consulted a psychiatrist about the definition of a psychopath and whether he thought the Macbeths could be described as such. He also helped us identify the folie à deux syndrome that linked the couple in their crime. This same psychiatrist helped Greg with Antony and Cleopatra and corroborated Patrick’s theory that much of Antony’s erratic behaviour and loss of judgment could be explained if he were an alcoholic. Cleopatra also fulfils the pattern of a codependant and enabler, as she encourages his maddest schemes, mainly, one senses, in order to prop up the collapsing hero and their collapsing relationship.

  Greg then asked the psychiatrist what psychological profile might fit Cleopatra? The an
swer came back that she was an almost textbook narcissist.

  I leapt to my computer and looked up examples of narcissists and found them to be people who, far from being in love with themselves, feel invalid unless other people praise them. Such people are in need of a perpetual audience—even if that audience is themselves in a mirror—and are given to disproportionate notions of their own importance, swinging from the depths of insecurity to ridiculous self-aggrandisement. It is as though they cannot bear to be alone and face the silence that might echo their own inconsequentiality. I also read that at the more insane end of the spectrum they have delusions of grandeur, imagining themselves to be Napoleon or Jesus, Joan of Arc or Cleopatra. ‘But she is Cleopatra!’ I shriek. Very confusing for her, just as it might be confusing to be a Michael Jackson or a Madonna. What do they think when they are alone and look in a mirror?

  I had noted over the years that a large part of the X-factor, star quality, or whatever you want to call it, is the desperate need to be a star. Whatever its psychological source, that need to have power over people can be developed into a self-fulfilling art, the art of playing with people’s desire. This provided a helpful insight into the desperation that lies at the heart of the play. A desperation for both lead characters to hang on to one another, and to the political and sexual power their combined personalities have achieved and which is on the wane from the beginning of the play.

  The actual Antony and Cleopatra were undoubtedly important on the world stage, and their love affair did have bearing on the future course of history. At the point where Shakespeare takes up their story, Antony’s reputation as a major player and his stake as co-ruler of the Roman Empire were extremely fragile. He was perceived by Rome as someone who had gone native in Egypt and had surrendered his reason to the exotic and erotic otherness of that country as embodied by Cleopatra. As for Cleopatra, her Empire depended for its very existence on Rome’s need for her abundant harvests and geographical position. If she proved too much trouble in making a ‘strumpet’s fool’ of their great Mark Antony, she could easily be got rid of, the 3,000-year-old Egyptian Empire would wither and be subsumed into the Roman one. Cleopatra personally identifies with her country, naming herself the goddess Isis, and Antony on his deathbed personifies her as the country itself (‘I am dying, Egypt’), and it is as near to the truth as of any character that her fate and the fate of her country are one and the same thing.