M: You don't like me, Bond. You don't like my methods. You think I'm an accountant, a bean counter more interested in my numbers than your instincts.

James Bond: The thought had occurred to me.

M: Good, because I think you're a sexist, misogynist dinosaur. A relic of the Cold War, whose boyish charms--

David Remnick: Wild guest here. A lot more of us have seen Judi Dench as M, the intelligence chief, who's the boss of James Bond than anything she's done in Shakespeare, particularly in the theater.

Judi Dench: Hail, King that shalt be. Hail, King that shalt be. They met me in the day of success, and I have learned by the perfectest report they have more in-- they have more in them than mortal knowledge.

David Remnick: But it's in Shakespeare's plays in the theater that Dench made her home and her reputation. She's played nearly all the big female roles, and she's distilled that body of knowledge and experience into a book called Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays The Rent. It's a collaboration with the actor Brendan O'Hea, and it delves into each role in each production that she's performed in. Dench has trouble with her vision and she can't read a script anymore, but she has an enormous store of Shakespeare, always at the ready. Could I ask you to recite a sonnet?

Judi Dench: I can do one for you, now if you like.

David Remnick: Sure. That would be fantastic.

Judi Dench: 

When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,

I all alone beweep my outcast state,

And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,

And look upon myself and curse my fate,

Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,

Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,

Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,

With what I most enjoy contented least;

Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,

Haply I think on thee, and then my state,

Like to the lark at break of day arising

From sullen earth sings hymns at heaven’s gate;

For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings

That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

David Remnick: What a remarkable poem that is.

Judi Dench: I think that's how it goes.

David Remnick: It's astonishing. Let's start, in a way, from the beginning. Do you have any memory of first hearing or seeing Shakespeare in your life?

Judi Dench: Well, yes, in my home. My father used to be able to recite the whole of the [unintelligible 00:02:57]. Recitation and singing and swimming and all those things were very much part of my childhood. My brother Jeffrey only ever wanted to be an actor. As a little boy, somebody would come to the house and eventually, they would say, "Oh, Jeff, what are you busy doing?" And he'd say "Oh, a school play," or something like that, and suddenly he would launch into Julius Caesar as a really small boy.

I can remember it now. For once upon a raw and gusty day, the troubled Tiber chafing with her shores, Caesar said to me, “Darest thou, now Cassius, leap in with me into this angry flood and swim to yonder point?" I could go on for a very, very long time.

David Remnick: It's just in you, and it's in you like that. It's internalized-

Judi Dench: It was.

David Remnick: -like bones and blood.

Judi Dench: It was. Going to school plays and seeing Shakespeare, which we all did at school. Yes, it was an organic part of the family. Very lucky for me.

David Remnick: I hate to ask you this question, but as you look at the way modern life is developed and I'm holding up an iPhone on Zoom to show you Exhibit A and all the media that has come in this way, do you think that kind of life, that kind of childhood and that kind of literary education is at all possible anymore?

Judi Dench: I think it's possible, but maybe not probable.

David Remnick: The barriers are too high.

Judi Dench: It's very sad, I think, for this kind of attitude towards Shakespeare is that it is of foreign language and something we don't under-- He was, well, in my estimation, the greatest writer who understood about every single emotion that any of us might feel at any time. It's not in a language, you can't understand if it's done well.

David Remnick: Tell me about the first role that you ever had in a Shakespeare play.

Judi Dench: I think it might have been-- it was as Titania at boarding school.

David Remnick: Do you remember anything about that performance, about that experience?

Judi Dench: I do remember about it. I wore one of my mother's old evening dresses for the boat.

[laughter]

David Remnick: I'll bet you looked great.

Judi Dench: I remember that very clearly. I'm not sure that she knew actually at the time [laughs], but yes, I do remember that. That's a play I know unbelievably well, never dreamt that I would play Titania at Stratford, or the first fair at the Old Vic or Hermia. Never dreamt that I would. I was very lucky that at school I was taught drama by somebody who had been an actress. I learned that it wasn't a bookish kind of thing. There's nothing to be frightened of. That's what I learned from her. That it is something that is accessible.

David Remnick: And it needs to be performed in front of you to get that sense more than just reading it from the text. Don't you think?

Judi Dench: I do think that. I do think.

David Remnick: When did ambition kick in for you? At what point did your attitude toward acting, much less acting Shakespeare, crossover from something that one did in school and as a luck to something that you wanted to do as your life's work?

Judi Dench: I originally wanted to be a designer, and I was taken to Stratford by my parents in 1953 to see Michael Redgrave as Lear. The set for that was so exquisite and so minimal. This was a set that was completely made the play continuous. I was training then to be a designer at York Art School. I can remember thinking, "I can't, that will never ever be in my imagination to do a set like that." Then because Jeff, my brother was already at Central and being an actor, I thought, "I'll have a go at that." I went and fortunately got into Central, which is the three-year training.

David Remnick: For American listeners, what is Central?

Judi Dench: The Central School of Speech and Drama. I went there for three years and at the end of the three years, we did a public show-- well, it wasn't a public show, it was a show in a west-end theater that we had chosen scenes from Shakespeare to do. To that show was invited a representative of films, somebody, I don't know, a representative from the Old Vic. There were about seven people there, that's all, and we all came on and did our things.

David Remnick: What was your thing?

Judi Dench: Mine was a bit of Miranda in The Tempest. The next day I got a message to go and see Michael Benthall at the Old Vic, 21 or 22.

David Remnick: So suddenly the Old Vic comes calling and destiny comes calling.

Judi Dench: Yes, and not only that, but they cast me as Ophelia in Hamlet for the next season.

David Remnick: Who was Hamlet in that production?

Judi Dench: John Neville.

David Remnick: Oh my God. [laughter]

Judi Dench: Oh my God. Isabel, you might say, David, because all during our training, we used to go to the Vic to sit in the gods for Ninepins and watch the seasons with John and Richard Burton who end up before the Beatles, but nevertheless, that incredible thing of people going, "Wow, look at these two beautiful young men." It was the same thing, and it'd be [unintelligible 00:09:20]

David Remnick: Overwhelmed it.

Judi Dench: Yes, but that's what I did.

David Remnick: Tell me a little bit about performing Ophelia at the Old Vic as a relative beginner.

Judi Dench: Not good enough.

David Remnick: Not good enough?

Judi Dench: It's what I have to tell you now.

David Remnick: What do you mean?

Judi Dench: Not good enough. Critics were very cross because the Vic at that time was the so-called National Theater. We didn't have a national theater then, and they were very cross that Michael had cast somebody who is a newcomer.

David Remnick: You played as I remember, in 19 62 in a production of Midsummer Night's Dream, you played Titania.

Judi Dench: Yes.

David Remnick: Then you played the same role 50 years later in 2010.

Judi Dench: With Peter Hall.

David Remnick: With Peter Hall. What was it like to play that very same role separated by half a century?

Judi Dench: I didn't have to learn it-

[laughter]

Judi Dench: -because I remember it. He set it up at the beginning like a group of actors coming into a building. Then he just wanted a character who was, in a way, representative of Elizabeth I coming in and looking down on the moor, and then coming down and as it were, going to see the play. Then she suddenly sees this young man who is playing Oberon, and she thinks, "Oh, hello, I might have at a go at this myself," and gives Titania a nudge, and said, "I'll have a go at this." That's how that evolved.

David Remnick: What is a rehearsal process that goes well and maybe sometimes it doesn't go so well?

Judi Dench: Peter had, because I worked with him so many times, he would stand at a lectern with the script in front of him so that you learned about the iambic pentameter and the way the speech should be observed. That sounds in a rather schoolmasterly, where I don't mean that it was like that at all, but he would sometimes beat out the meter.

David Remnick: It sounds slightly terrifying to have him be a metronome at a lectern.

Judi Dench: I know.

David Remnick: And that tunes your ear.

Judi Dench: I know the meter of it and the line endings was something you learnt about very early.

David Remnick: Can you give me an example, some little bit of a play how to do it well and how to do it poorly?

Judi Dench: What you've got to get is the balance of the meter, which you must observe, the iambic pentameter, which is da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. That's all it is, da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. At the same time, you must observe that, but the audience mustn't be aware that that what's uppermost in your mind. I'll do a little bit of Titania. She says to Oberon.

These are the forgeries of jealousy:

And never, since the middle summer’s spring,

Met we on hill, in dale, forest or mead,

By paved fountain or by rushy brook,

Or in the beached margent of the sea,

To dance our ringlets to the whistling wind,

But with thy brawls thou hast disturbed our sport.

Now you see, you can elide lines together, but in a way you've got to learn a way sounding as if that is one statement, which it is, nevertheless marking the ends of the lines.

David Remnick: Is everything else easy, relatively speaking? Is Shakespeare in Love or James Bond or other things that you do--

Judi Dench: There's nothing easy about James Bond.

[laughter]

David Remnick: Really? Tell me.

Judi Dench: Acting a very tall girl in an office-

[laughter]

Judi Dench: -trying to know about things. Oh gosh. I find all of it difficult, all of it difficult, and all of it a challenge. The thing is that Shakespeare is in verse. You don't have to think about that though. It's fatal to let an audience go away from a play, only being aware of the fact that that was in some kind of verse, but it is equally bad that they go away from the play not hearing that beat of the heart because some of those lines there when Viola is asked by Orsino, and he thinks she's masquerading as a boy, she says, "My father had a daughter loved a man. As it might be, were I a woman, I should your lordship."

Now that is in verse, and he said, "What's her history?" She says, "A blank, my lord. She never told her love, but let concealment, like a worm in the bud, feed on her damask cheek.

She pined in thought, and with a green and yellow melancholy, she sat like patience on a monument, smiling at grief. Was not this love, indeed? We men may say more, swear more, but indeed our thoughts are more than will, still we prove much in our vows, but little in our love." Does that go anyway to explaining, David, what I meant?

David Remnick: It does. What it doesn't explain is why then you're saying that doing James Bond or Shakespeare in Love or seemingly more modern vernacular roles, why that is so hard too, or is it equally hard even in the years? Are you suggesting that it's equally hard to do that?

Judi Dench: Why I love Shakespeare so much is because I feel very, very, very supported by it, by the text with M-

David Remnick: In Bond, yes.

Judi Dench: -in Bond. I knew Bernard Lee very well who was the original M, and I knew him very, very well. He's the person I first did my first television with. In my mind, it's always Bernard Lee, so that's quite difficult. It's all difficult. I think it's all difficult, and sometimes you never crack it at all, I think.

David Remnick: What did you never crack? Of all your Shakespearean roles, if you look back, do you look back on any of them as in a spirit of regret, or I didn't quite achieve what I had hoped there?

Judi Dench: That's why I've done a lot of them, more than twice, and you get another go at something.

David Remnick: Have you ever forgotten your lines on stage?

Judi Dench: Oh, David. Have you ever forgotten? Oh yes, and more times than I stand.

David Remnick: What's your strategy? What do you do when that happens?

Judi Dench: I knew with Shakespeare, you just put in the beats. Sir Ralph Richardson used to do it. When he played Prospero, and he had, "Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves, and ye who on the sand with printless foot." If he dried on one of those words, he'd say, "Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves, and ye who on the sand with [unintelligible 00:17:41] foot do chase the ebbing Neptune." The moments pass, and you always think, [unintelligible 00:17:48]. Not Sir Ralph.

David Remnick: [laughs] I like that. How is it different to do Shakespeare on stage and on film?

Judi Dench: Much easier on stage, because the audience is so much part of it. The audience are there, and you know if you're telling the story properly. You know.

David Remnick: It's not a matter of endurance, it's a matter of the audience presence is--

Judi Dench: That's entirely it's to do with. That's the only reason.

David Remnick: Incredible. I never would have guessed that in a million years.

Judi Dench: Otherwise, I'm not going to get dressed up and go out on the stage and nobody can do it for myself, am I?

David Remnick: [laughs] The camera is not--

Judi Dench: I'm only going to do it for you, David. If I know you bought a seat, I'd say that, "Oh, my friend David's here," and then I'll say, "I'll do it for him." I once was feeling very off-color, and I said to Ian McKellen, "I'm going to pretend that Jesus Christ, the Holy Ghost, and God the Father have bought three seats in the stalls, and I'm going to do it for them tonight." He said, "Judi, that's absolutely terrific, although they'll only need one seat," he said.

[laughter]

Judi Dench: It's the most adorable.

David Remnick: Judi Dench, thank you so much.

Judi Dench: Thank you, David, very much indeed.

David Remnick: It was a great pleasure. Dame Judi Dench. She has a new book out called Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays The Rent, written with Brendan O’Hea.

[music]

 

Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.