Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent

Dame Judi Dench, one of Britain's most celebrated actresses, has spent nearly seven decades performing Shakespeare on stage, screen, and radio. In this memoir-style book, structured as a series of interviews with actor and friend Brendan O'Hea, she reflects on every Shakespeare role she has played, offering candid, often irreverent commentary on the characters, the plays, and the craft of acting. The title derives from the nickname Dench and her late husband, actor Michael Williams, gave to Shakespeare during the 1970s, when the couple worked almost continuously for the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) and Shakespeare's plays provided their livelihood.

O'Hea explains in his introduction that the project began as recorded conversations for the archive at Shakespeare's Globe in London but evolved into a book. Over four years, he read scenes aloud while Dench offered commentary, frequently digressing into anecdotes and deflecting questions with humor. He characterizes her as instinct-driven and resistant to academic analysis, deeply reluctant to be dogmatic about Shakespeare. Her only certainty is that there is no single right way to perform the plays.

The book opens with Lady Macbeth, the role that first drew Dench to Shakespeare when she saw her brother Peter play King Duncan in a school production. She describes two major productions: at Nottingham in 1963, which toured West Africa to participatory audiences, and director Trevor Nunn's landmark 1976 RSC staging at the Other Place in Stratford-upon-Avon. This stripped-back production in a tin hut, with a chalk circle on the floor and orange boxes for the set, featured Ian McKellen as Macbeth. Dench insists Lady Macbeth should not enter as an obvious villain but that the audience should watch her ambition grow. She argues the character acts entirely for her husband and traces Lady Macbeth's disintegration through the widening emotional distance between the couple.

A chapter on Stratford-upon-Avon establishes Dench's personal connection to Shakespeare's hometown. She first visited in 1953 at eighteen and experienced what she calls a "Damascene moment" about abandoning her dream of being a theater designer upon seeing Robert Colquhoun's set for King Lear. She met Williams in Stratford and raised their daughter Finty in nearby Charlecote. In 2022, Dench and fellow actor Kenneth Branagh were awarded the Freedom of the Town, an honor conferred only six times since the actor David Garrick first received it in 1768.

Throughout the book, Dench returns to the directors who shaped her understanding of Shakespeare. Peter Hall taught her about verse structure and iambic pentameter, the five-beat rhythmic line underpinning Shakespeare's verse. John Barton brought equal rigor to text work. Trevor Nunn explored psychology and relationships in rehearsal rooms full of laughter. Dench credits all three, along with Michael Benthall, her first director at the Old Vic, with revolutionizing Shakespearean performance in the 20th century.

The chapter on Viola in Twelfth Night reveals one of Dench's signature roles. In Barton's 1969 RSC production, which toured for three years, she found the emotional center of a character maintaining three personas: a woman without identity, the disguised boy Cesario, and, only at the very end, Viola herself. On soliloquies, Dench states that "no one ever lies" in a soliloquy. A tragedy shadowed the production: Charlie Thomas, who played Duke Orsino, died by suicide during the Australian tour. Dench describes channeling grief into performance energy, a process she would draw on again after Williams's death.

Dench's chapter on Portia in The Merchant of Venice is the book's most hostile assessment of a Shakespeare play. She acknowledges its merits as writing but finds all the characters morally repellent, identifying Portia's racist couplet after the Prince of Morocco's departure and the forced conversion of Shylock as reasons she finds the play ugly. Yet she insists it should not be banned: Actors should say the lines and let the audience decide.

Ophelia, Dench's first professional role, is treated with particular emotional weight. Benthall cast her from drama school at the Old Vic, and her reviews were harsh. The part was taken away for the American tour and given to actress Barbara Jefford. Decades later, Dench played Gertrude opposite Daniel Day-Lewis's Hamlet in director Richard Eyre's National Theatre production. Day-Lewis experienced a nervous collapse during the ghost scene, conflating his own father's death with Hamlet's.

Dench's treatment of Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing is among the book's richest chapters. She played the role opposite Donald Sinden in Barton's 1976 RSC production and characterizes Beatrice as nursing a hurt from a past relationship with Benedick, using sardonic wit as armor. The gulling scene, where Beatrice overhears friends criticizing her, yields genuine tenderness. Dench insists the line "Kill Claudio" must never get a laugh because it would trivialize Hero's story.

Isabella in Measure for Measure, played three times, poses what Dench considers Shakespeare's most enduring unresolved question: whether Isabella accepts the Duke's marriage proposal. She favors ambiguity and connects the play to the timeless situation of women whose accusations against powerful men are dismissed, citing Angelo's line: "Who will believe thee, Isabel?"

Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra, directed by Hall at the National Theatre opposite Anthony Hopkins, is the role Dench calls "a mountain." At five foot one, she faced skepticism about the casting. Hall's foundational note was transformative: Each scene reveals a different aspect of Cleopatra, like a pointillist painting whose dots of color form a complete image from a distance. The production used real snakes for Cleopatra's death, which Dench named Wilson, Kepple, and Betty at her husband's suggestion.

In Nunn's 1969 RSC production of The Winter's Tale, Dench doubled Hermione and Perdita, a feat last attempted in 1887. The trial scene was performed with radical simplicity: Dench stood still in a white shift and "did nothing." In Branagh's 2015 Garrick Theatre production, she played Paulina, whom she characterizes as a truth-teller serving as Leontes's conscience for 16 years.

Juliet in Romeo and Juliet, directed by Franco Zeffirelli at the Old Vic, was Dench's defining early role. Zeffirelli had never directed Shakespeare and cared little for verse, working on instinct and Mediterranean passion. The reviews were initially hostile, but critic Kenneth Tynan's notice called the production "a revelation, even perhaps a revolution." Dench identifies Zeffirelli as teaching her about passion, complementing the verse technique she learned from Hall, Barton, and Nunn. Playing Shakespeare, she argues, requires both form and emotion in marriage.

Interspersed among the play chapters are thematic sections on play as a creative principle, ensemble work, the necessity of failure, and the future of Shakespeare. Dench defines Shakespeare as "an international language, a beacon for humanity, and a bridge across cultures," connecting iambic pentameter to the rhythm of life and the beating of the heart.

The book closes with an epilogue in which Dench discovers, through the BBC genealogy series Who Do You Think You Are?, that her nine-times great-aunt, Beate Brahe, was a lady-in-waiting to the Queen of Denmark. The family tree of Brahe's son, the astronomer Tycho Brahe, includes the names Rozencrantz and Guildenstern, characters in Hamlet. Shakespeare's company visited Elsinore during Beate Brahe's service, and Dench gets goosebumps at the thought that "through my ancestors, I may have touched the hem of Shakespeare's doublet."