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Last week, I explored London’s Hands Off! rally.

Shakespeare’s birthday is next week, on April 23. I’ve been saving this review to celebrate 461 years of the Bard.

Book: Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent by Judi Dench with Brendan O’Hea
Genre: Memoir
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press
Publication date: 2023

Source: E-book borrowed from the library

Summary: This book was originally intended to be an oral history project for the archives of Shakespeare’s Globe.

The format of the book reflects the original intention. We see the questions that Brendan O’Hea, who is also an experienced actor and director, followed by Judi Dench’s answers. They clearly have a strong friendship that includes lots of humor and occasional crankiness.

“The Man Who Pays the Rent” was an inside joke between Judi Dench and her husband from when they both worked for the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Most chapters are named after Shakespeare plays. Dench, with O’Hea’s guidance, tells enough of the plot of the play to understand the stories that she has to tell. In some cases, when Judi Dench was cast as more than one character, the reader is led through the play a second time to cover the plot from that perspective.

Thoughts: I was a little skeptical of the format, at first, but I shouldn’t have doubted the capacity of Judi Dench to delight me. Reading this was so much fun. My memories of my limited exposure to Shakespeare’s plays were all summoned.

Here’s one little-known fact that I learned about Judi Dench. In 2022, she was awarded the Freedom of the Town of Stratford.

It was such an honor. Both Ken [Kenneth Branagh] and I were given it. It means we can now walk our sheep through Stratford with impunity. After the ceremony in the Town Hall, we had to have our photographs taken outside. The organisers had arranged for some sheep to be there.

I’m always surprised when I learn the title of a Shakespeare play that I’ve never heard before. The first example in Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent was Coriolanus. Judi Dench’s description made me think that this might be a play that I want to learn more about.

We had a chorus of local amateur actors. It was thrilling, very operatic. So much of the play is about the tensions between the ruling few and the masses and having a large crowd of extras really helped tell that story.

I enjoyed the hints about how actors think about acting. This was in response to a question about whether Judi Dench doubted her casting as Cleopatra:

Not really, because I totally believed in Peter [Hall]. His rigour with the verse and understanding of the play made you feel very secure. I did warn him that he’d hired a menopausal munchkin but he just laughed.

Peter gave me the most wonderful note at the start of rehearsals. He said, ‘Don’t think you have to play the whole of Cleopatra in each scene. You reveal different aspects of her throughout the play, and hopefully by the end the audience will believe they’ve seen a fully realised character. It’s a bit like pointillism. Look closely at a Seurat painting, and you see a dot of red, dot of green, a couple of dots of yellow; stand back, and you see a woman with a parasol.

The final chapter is called ‘Advice.’ It’s mostly about advice for actors, but the first two things she said strike me as excellent advice for all of us:

Be kind, be curious, be playful. And keep a sense of humour.

Appeal: Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent is a long book — 400 pages in print, according to The Storygraph. But it’s not at all difficult to read. They do such a great job of explaining the plays that I never felt lost, even though I’m only familiar with a handful of Shakespeare’s plays. I recommend this book to anyone with an interest in acting, Shakespeare, or Judi Dench.

I always take any excuse to publish my general maxim about Shakespeare’s plays, so here it is:

Romeo and Juliet taught me not to be stupid about love when I was young. Macbeth taught me not to be stupid about ambition when I was an adult. As I age, King Lear teaches me not to be stupid about the burdens that I place on the younger people in my life.

Have you read Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent? What did you think?