Dame Harriet Walter has an impressive resumé. Especially known for portraying intelligent, authoritative women, she is widely regarded as one of England’s greatest classical stage actresses while also building an impressive screen career. You may remember her, if you’re reaching for a face to put to the name, as Clementine Churchill in The Crown or Fanny Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility.
For those with more darkly comedic tastes, you might recall her as Dasha in Killing Eve or Lady Caroline in Succession. Dame Harriet’s definitive stage role is as Brutus in Julius Caesar. But, it is to her role as the clever, complex heroine, Portia, in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice that I now turn.
In this early Jacobean play, Portia disguises herself as a man so she can enter the Venetian court, where women are not allowed to practise law. In disguise, she outwits Shylock by using her legal knowledge to save her lover’s beloved friend, Antonio, while ensuring justice is upheld.
Of this part, Dame Harriet says:
Few acting roles for women let loose this opportunity to command, to match the great weight of Shylock and control the rhythm, timing, thoughts and feelings of audience and courtroom alike. I learnt that I could do it. I enjoyed it, ... felt jealous of my male counterparts that they so often got a go at it. Like Portia I had a moment’s insight into what it was to be a man. (p.35)
Like many of Shakespeare’s heroines, Portia is only taken seriously when she masquerades as the opposite sex. The brilliance she exhibits while in male clothes is unequivocally her own, but no one listens to her until they think she is a man.
Why? Because for millennia, women have been commanded to be silent and obedient. In 1 Timothy—a letter in the second major part of the Bible, and according to many conservatives the only part worth reading (until they want to condemn homosexuality)—the writer exhorts his friend and disciple to:
Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection.
But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.
For Adam was first formed, then Eve.
And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression. (Ch. 2:11-14, KJV)
Notwithstanding women’s several important speaking roles in the Bible, by the time Shakespeare wrote The Merchant of Venice, the Church of England's expectations on women to be silent, retiring, and submissive were taken for granted. Shakespeare’s heroines repeatedly defy this convention and, to his credit, he rarely punishes them for doing so (even if their fathers or husbands do).
Contemporary conduct writers, by contrast, reinforced the prevailing ideal of female silence and passivity (housework was OK). For example, the popular poet and writer, Gervase Markham (1568-1637), called on good housewives to be ‘wise in discourse but not frequent therein, sharp and quick of speech, but not bitter or talkative, secret in her affairs’ (first published in Markham’s Country Contentments, 1615, as cited in Hull, p. 46).
Markham’s advice reflected a broader culture that increasingly restrained women. The injunction in 1 Timothy that women should be silent had, by the English Renaissance, become deeply embedded in social expectations. These attitudes had consequences that extended well beyond etiquette.
Take the example of traditional female healers. Research traces a direct connection between the suppression of women’s healing practices, the persecution of many of these women as witches, and the emergence of male-controlled medical professions. Men came to dominate roles as apothecaries, physicians, and surgeons, occupations that were eventually professionalized through the Physicians’ and Surgeons’ guilds. Women were excluded from these professions because they were barred from obtaining the university education required for admission to the guilds (Gregory, p. 173).
Against this backdrop, Portia’s decision to disguise herself as a male lawyer is not just a theatrical device: it is a direct challenge to the social conventions that denied women a public voice and strove to keep them predominantly in the home.
Women in the Middle Ages and Renaissance were subject to countless forms of torture and humiliation for taking up too much space. The threat of being publicly labelled, humiliated, or disciplined as a “scold” helps explain why female speech could be—and can be—treated as a form of social disorder rather than merely an expression of opinion.
Disciplinary penalties included fines and penances as well as humiliating and traumatizing forms of public humiliation, such as the cucking stool, the ducking stool, and the infamous scold’s bridle:
To this day, women are frequently condemned for being too loud and taking up too much space. One commonly cited example is Kamala Harris who, during the 2020 vice-presidential debate, was criticized for interrupting her opponents, despite assertions by political analysts that male politicians interrupt as much or more frequently.
Another is Greta Thunberg, who has repeatedly been dismissed as hysterical because of her unflinching style of advocacy. Experts note that such criticisms are disproportionately applied to outspoken women (e.g., Rudman & Glick).
Now, I have no desire to take up more space than anyone else. But the exhortation to take up as little space as possible does not dovetail with my understanding of equality—an inherent right that is also constitutionally enshrined in around 85% of the world’s constitutions (Heymann et al.), which explicitly guarantee equality or prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex and/or gender.
I didn’t learn about my inherent right to equal opportunity in political science classes, nor did I place much stock in religious commands to be silent and obedient. As always, it was art that inspired me—in this case, to take up more space.
Which female figures in art saw through the flimsy sham of the limits imposed on them, instead blazing trails that shaped the way I move through the world? The examples are abundant, spanning every art form. Here, I consider just a few.
Unsurprisingly, Eve—that great temptress—is among them. It was through the English Renaissance poet Amelia Lanyer’s retelling of the story of Eve and Adam in the Garden of Eden that I came to see the female pursuit of knowledge as both dangerous and profoundly noble. In Lanyer’s telling, it is Eve—not Adam—who is the bearer of knowledge:
Yet Men will boast of Knowledge, which he tooke
From Eves fair hand, as from a learned Booke. (lines 807-808)
Other poems also revealed the perilous yet, however paradoxically, life-giving quality of agency. The Lady of Shallot, as Tennyson portrays her, helped me understand that the silent isle sheltering this isolated woman is not a protective sanctuary.
The Lady of Shallot's true curse is not what happens if she leaves, but what fails to happen if she stays. What does she lose by remaining? The freedom to choose. Her choice to leave results in her death, but it is death on her own terms.
She left the web, she left the loom,
She made three paces thro' the room,
She saw the water-lily bloom,
She saw the helmet and the plume,
She look’d down to Camelot.
Out flew the web and floated wide;
The mirror crack’d from side to side
While poetry and novels have always been the art forms that shaped me most, at least two literary figures became inspirations through their film and television adaptations.
Little Women's Jo March, and in particular Winona Ryder’s inhabitation of her character in the 1994 cinematic production (dir. Gillian Armstrong), illuminated the way towards courage, joyful living in spite of hardship—oh, and a wild love of theatricals.
Jo's imagination and ambition to be the best version of herself fired my own: ‘Late at night my mind would come alive with voices and stories and friends as dear to me as any in the real world. I gave myself up to it, longing for transformation.’
Similarly, it was Megan Follows as the precocious dreamer Anne of Green Gables in the 1985 television miniseries (dir. Kevin Sullivan) who inspired me to break slates over boys’ heads—not literally of course, but because her defiant gesture expressed her fierce sense of self.
I was only nine when that miniseries was released, and while I read and re-read Lucy Maud Montgomery’s books soon thereafter, my introduction to the dazzlingly clever (if not angelically good) red-headed orphan was through television. (I should add that Anne also introduced me to the rebellious Lady of Shalott).
Love her or loathe her (I do both), that ‘slut-shamed’ mistress of ennui, Mrs. Robinson, in Mike Nichols' 1967 film, The Graduate, also impressed upon me as a teenager that, while preying on the young is a violation of their youth, living the life of a bored, neglected housewife is deadly. So, warts and all, ‘Here’s to you, Mrs. Robinson.'
From the moment I saw my first live theatre performance, I knew the stage was a magical place for space-taking. SIX of its recent powerhouses are the wives who made Henry VIII go down in herstory, in the feminist revisionist musical about the 'Queens'—each of whom is 'sorry/not sorry' for taking up too much space.
Visual art is also an inspiration. The ‘Fearless Girl’ statue in New York, sculpted by Kristen Visbal, stands in defiance of Wall Street’s ‘Charging Bull.' Since its installation in 2017, the artwork has drawn millions of admirers, many of whom adopt the same brave stance as they pause for a photo.
I have never posed alongside the Fearless Girl (however ironically or significantly, I have been too shy), but the courageous child nevertheless reminds me that I must not let my spirit be cowed when the heavyweights enter the ring.
From the twenty-first century to the Classics, women have been raising hell. Ancient examples include the defiant Antigone, the wily Cleopatra, the clever Helen of Troy, the shrewd Penelope and so on. As Charlotte Higgins says in The Guardian, ‘They may have murdered their husbands or their children, or turned men into pigs, but the females of the classical world were fabulous.’
That many of the more outrageous women in art (and life) were punished is not inherently wrong—sometimes their actions were loathsome—but that they were punished, as they so often were, for taking up too much space most definitely is. I'm glad they went down swinging. They were loud because they knew they were worthy.
Cheers to them, and here’s to taking up more space.
Bibliography
Di Novi, D. (Producer), & Armstrong, G. (Director). (1994). Little women [Film]. Columbia Pictures; Di Novi Pictures.
Gregory, P. (2024). Normal women: 900 years of making history. William Collins.
Heymann, J. et al. (2026). How Constitutional Rights Can Make a Difference. World Policy Center. Accessed July 28, 2026, from https://www.worldpolicycenter.org/events-launches/advancing-equality
Higgins, C. (2010, October 8). Harridans, harlots and heroines: Women of the classical world. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2010/oct/08/harridans-harlots-heroines-women-classical
Hull, S. W. (1996). Women according to men: The world of Tudor-Stuart women. AltaMira Press.
Lanyer, A. (1611/1993). Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. In The Poems of Aemelia Lanyer (S. Woods, ed.). Oxford University Press.
Rudman, L. A., & Glick, P. (2008). The social psychology of gender: How power and intimacy shape gender relations. Guilford Press.
Tennyson, A. (2004). The Lady of Shalott. In C. Ricks (Ed.), The poems of Tennyson (3rd ed., Vol. 2, pp. 233–240). Pearson Longman.
Walter, H. (2016). Brutus and other heroines: Playing Shakespeare’s roles for women. Nick Hern Books.