Present, Beth, Betsy, Katharine, Murielle, Pat, Rosie, Sealia, Wendy
Pat began by listing some of the parts Judi Dench has played in films. She was M, the Virgin Queen (Elizabeth), a retiree in Marigold Hotel, an Irish mother, and other parts. She even played Virgin Mary in her school nativity play. Otherwise, for much of her acting life, she was doing Shakespeare. She had 31 roles in 21 plays, which is actually a little over half of Shakespeare’s work, so there are several plays she admits not knowing and others that she didn’t discuss because she didn’t play in them. In the discussion of Midsummer Night’s Dream, Judi Dench said that there is no right way of performing Shakespeare. The rule for actors is whether the audience liked it or not.
Pat admitted that she was initially perplexed about how to talk about the book which deals with 21 plays in random order as well as other subjects about Judi Dench’s experience.
First we discussed the title, Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays The Rent. We agreed that it shows her sense of humour and her irreverence. She doesn’t take herself seriously. Katharine said that in fact the man who paid the rent was Marigold Butter. Judi Dench did an ad with her husband Mikey for Marigold and it paid for their house.
Has she retired at this point? We know that she can’t see well or read well nowadays but she would probably work if she was helped to learn lines.
Apparently the language of the interviews with Brendan O’Hea was tidied up because Dame Judi is prone to swearing. But there is still raunchy language in the text. Katharine feels that her personality matches Shakespeare. Of course she is also a person of her time as well. We liked her sense of humour, her teasing and joking. She mentions in the book that it’s important to hold on to your inner child.
Pat appreciated that Judi was respectful of other people, giving credit to the company. In a company, the actors are bound to each other. Someone who might play a small part in one play can have a big one in another. They try to put the good of the group before individual egos. Judi Dench displays great generosity when speaking of other performers. They seem to have had lots of fun together. She’s nostalgic about an ideal summer spent in Stratford; it’s all gone now, with some of the actors dead, and the practice of having large companies where actors take small and large parts is over. Now it’s too expensive to have company and that camaraderie may be lost.
Pat asked what we thought about the way she analyses the characters. Rosie said that it deepened her appreciation of Shakespeare. Dench looks at the plays from a different perspective —commenting on the individual characters that she has played. Katharine felt that it’s a book to dip into to keep on one’s nightstand to come back to. Like the tales from Shakespeare that Charles and Mary Lamb rewrote for children, it’s easy to understand. Sealia loved being reminded of Shakespeare’s plays. She acted Shakespeare in high school and her love of the writer came from performing in his plays.
Sealia disagreed with Judi Dench’s interpretation of Romeo and Juliet. Dench says they are love-crazy teenagers who mature in the course of the play, but Sealia sees it as more problematic. She is bothered by fact that Romeo has another girlfriend that he drops when he sees Juliet. In fact, the existence of Rosalind gets omitted in a lot of productions. We wondered whether the audience in Shakespeare’s time would admire the lovers as much as contemporary theatre-goers. In the Renaissance era, the parents’ opinion would be seriously considered. Beth agreed that Juliet is very young and foolish, as shown by the stupid scheme where she has to pretend to die. We noted that Dench said that Franco Zefferelli taught her about performing with passion.
We were curious about the French reception of Shakespeare. Murielle finds his plays compelling in the way they mix comedy and tragedy. She compared him to Molière and Racine whose plays are either comic or tragic. This reminded Wendy of when she learned about the unities of time, place and action adopted from Aristotle by the French classicists. Shakespeare has no interest in the unities; his plays jump around in time and place, and mix high and low, comic and tragic.
Pat felt that Judi Dench exercised a great deal of liberty in her acting. She came up in the late 50s and 60s, a time when people were freeing themselves from convention. The theatre environment was especially liberating. Directors like Peter Brooks experimented in all kinds of ways. Pat was lucky enough to have seen his innovative production of Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Sealia thought that as an actress Dench could get away with things that other people couldn’t. We heard about how Vanessa Redgrave and Judi Dench were at a CND demonstration. They were both arrested, and Judi said “I can’t go with you, I’ve got a matinée.” The police let her go.
We spoke about her attitude to the female characters she plays. Is her sympathy for them influenced by her own happiness? Sealia felt that she was probably sharing mainly the positive aspects of her life. She was lucky to work with influential directors (men), and she is happy to give them credit. Pat doesn’t think she would be harassed, or if she was, she might have thought it was fun. The overall impression is that she was never treated too badly, although that’s not quite true. There are critics who panned her. She dealt with them by learning not to read them. Her first role as Ophelia was panned, but the director was confident and encouraged her to keep on acting. Some of us were jealous of her childhood. She had artistic parents who encouraged her to be self-confident. Her father read poetry to her at bedtime.
She does tell about some awful experiences, but often she laughs about them. For example, in playing Cleopatra with live snakes, she found one of them in her wig. She went on playing without making a fuss. We found it surprising given her admitted fear of worms.
Betsy struck by her work ethic and impressive memory. We agreed that these are two important reasons for her success. The actress says she doesn’t like watching herself on film because she doesn’t want to see mistakes. She would do everything differently if she did it all again.
We talked about her attitude to Shakespeare. She believes that every possible human emotion is there in the plays. Beth was struck by the number of strong female characters—women who defy patriarchy. Shakespeare portrays women well, perhaps in part because he was writing when a woman was on the British throne. Beth suggested that his wife might have been an influence too. Are his women strong because they were played by boys? Not really because other playwrights from the same era haven’t created such memorable female characters.
Will Shakespeare continue to be relevant?
Rosie said that she would recommend Dench’s book to anyone studying Shakespeare. We then spoke about the current debate about whether kids’ reading skills have declined. Professors are saying that their students read less and less. Betsy said that in the USA, children are being taught to pass tests. So they are reading excerpts rather than books. Even students at Harvard don’t have adequate reading skills.
Sealia pointed out that the plays are not meant to be read. Instead they should be acted. You have to hear the dialogue to get the rhythm and meter. Of course, lots of kids have never seen a play.
Katharine wondered whether the plays will survive as the English language changes. Could chat GPT come up with a line like the one on Mikey Williams’s tombstone (“You have bereft me of all words.”)? Wendy mentioned a book she’s currently having difficulty reading because the narrator uses words and events taken from social media. Sealia said that her kids need context for references from only 50 years ago—words like “landline”. Betsy is reading Le Voyage à Paimpol which deals with a woman’s life 50 years ago. It deals with the idea of the second shift, where women worked full time and then went home and took care of all the cooking and cleaning. Does this cultural context need to be explained?
It’s clear that Judi Dench is in love with Shakespeare, relishing the language and the poetry. Katharine pointed out that besides the plays, Dench alludes to the sonnets, many of which she learned by heart during the pandemic. She refused to learn sonnet 60 because she felt it was too full of despair, speaking of “wasted days, wasted friends.” She was at her lowest during the pandemic and the line from Richard II—“I wasted time and now doth time waste me”—haunted her. On the other hand, she thought Romeo’s lines are the greatest chat-up speech ever:
On the 500th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, his plays were performed all round the world. So perhaps, we all agreed, his work will endure a bit longer in this very different world from the one he lived in. Perhaps AI is not yet capable of writing a comparable piece of literature.
