Shakespeare and Judi Dench

I absolutely loved listening to Judi Dench and fellow Shakespearean actor Brendan O'Hea chat about their work, their industry, their colleagues and friends, and the man himself in Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent.

On GoodReads, both are listed as authors of the book, though O'Hea did the lion's share of the work in converting 90 hours of discussion into book form. Dench suffers from macular degeneration, so reading and, I assume, writing and revision are now not possible.

The book's title is what Judi and her husband, Michael Williams, said about Shakespeare. Both were members of the Royal Shakespeare Company, aka RSC, and acting, mostly in Shakespeare's plays, was their job. They often acted together and lived outside Stratford-upon-Avon.  But I digress.

As Brendan says, Judi has an incredible memory regarding the productions she has been in, and I relished not only hearing about the director's vision and coaching, but the costuming, the set designs, the backstage chatter, the audiences, the pranks, the reviews and reviewers.

I appreciated Judi's and Brendan's discussions, at times contentious, about the various characters and especially how Judi's understanding of them changed as she changed and matured. The book is primarily a deep dive into each of the characters Judi played, not necessarily in chronological order, in each of the plays she was in. It starts with Macbeth--I loved hearing about her playing Lady Macbeth with Ian McKellan as Macbeth. I've seen the video of this production, and it is haunting and incredible and the best Macbeth I've ever seen.

I was gratified to learn that Judi dislikes Merchant of Venice and Portia for all the reasons that I do. She was in several productions of Midsummer's Night Dream, playing Titania, of course, but earlier she was one of the fairies when she was just out of acting school. She was Maria as well as Viola in Twelfth Night, Juliet as well as Nurse in Romeo and Juliet, Isabella in Measure for Measure, Hermione and Perdita in the same production of Winter's Tale as well as Paulina later on, Katherine in Henry V, and the list goes on and on. Oh, I forgot, what a Cleopatra she was--I would love to have seen that production on the stage!

As Titania

In addition to remembering loads of specific details about the various productions, her ability to quote passages and not just from characters she played was outstanding.

However, three things really shine through and define Judi for me:

• Her reverence for her job--as an actress, she saw her job as telling the story as Shakespeare wrote it. That's not to say she had a problem with modern settings/costumes, she didn't--but she believed that the words told the story and she never wanted to deviate from the words. She respected the audiences she played to and felt an obligation to tell the story to them as well as she could.
• Her love of Shakespeare's genius--his words, his poetry, his understanding of the human condition in all its contradictions and complexity. She loves iambic pentameter and says its rhythm is the same as the human heartbeat. I loved her asides the passion or poetry or insight contained in a line would give her chills.
• Her joie de vivre is intoxicating. 

Truly a 5-star listen. And truly, this is a book that needs to be listened to--just to hear Shakespeare's words said aloud!

Oh, and the hardcover is exactly 400 pages, so this counts as one of my Big Book Summer Challenge books.