Judi Dench on Shakespeare
Q: Why do you love Shakespeare so much? Why would you fight to have him kept on the school curriculum and performed in theatres?
A: Shakespeare is an international language, a beacon for humanity, and a bridge across cultures. His writing encompasses the minutiae of everyday life. When you come to do the plays you often recognise something that you’ve never been able to articulate.
The answer is from Judi Dench, now an amazing 89, responding to her friend Brendan O’Hea in a book that is essential reading for all English teachers and lovers of Shakespeare. How wonderful it is to have her fascinating voice (spiky, precise, funny) articulate such profoundly deep knowledge about the plays, a level of insight accumulated over decades of performance at the highest level. Acting in or directing a play gets you inside its skin like no amount of study or reading can do.
Dench’s range is immense: this books covers an extraordinary number of female roles, from major to minor: Lady Macbeth, Gertrude, Ophelia, Cleopatra, Titania, Juliet, Viola, Beatrice, Hermione, all three Lear daughters and many more. In each case O’Hea skifully leads Dench in steadily deepening reflections on the characters’ psychologies. The chapters on these characters are interspersed with standalone reflections on topics like rehearsing, being part of a company and critics.
A few things I marked:
(Viola in Twelfth Night, which I loved directing): ‘Perhaps the act of dressing up as a boy - swaddling herself in her brother’s clothes - gives her a closer connection to her lost twin, a comforting hope that he’s still alive … isn’t it interesting that when you see the play, you only get to hear her real name at the very end?’
(Twelfth Night): ‘It’s extraordinary how many resurrections happen in Shakespeare’s plays - especially of children. He wrote only two plays which featured twins - this and The Comedy of Errors - and in both plays the twins are involved in shipwrecks.’
She can’t stand that highly problematic play, The Merchant of Venice. She’s not precious about it just because Shakespeare was the author.
(Ophelia in Hamlet) ‘But because there’s no mother, who can she share that with? Who is there to advise her? Especially now that Laertes has gone. Where’s her friend, her confidante, her lady-in-waiting, her nurse? At least Hamlet has Horatio, and Rozencrantz and Guildenstern. But Ophelia has nobody. She’s a young girl in the court on her own.’
(Hamlet). ‘It should all go very fast. In fact, the whole final third of the play should rattle along. Gertrude says earlier: ‘One woe doth tread upon another’s heel, / So fast they follow.’ Which is true. It’s all mounting up, hurtling towards chaos.’
(Measure for Measure). ‘You can say that about every scene in Shakespeare - characters are always finding themselves in situations they don’t expect to be caught up in.’
(King Lear). ‘Why is Lear so keen to retain all those knights? What else does he have? The knights give him the illusion that he still has authority and a kingdom and a position, which in his heart he must know that he’s losing.’
(The end of King Lear). ‘The family haven’t been together since that very first scene - and now Lear stands there, amongst his three dead daughters. Reunited, but under such dreadful circumstances.’
(The Comedy of Errors, another one I’ve directed). ‘Most of Shakespeare’s comedies start with displacement and strife. The tragedies, on the other hand, tend to open with celebrations and optimism. And: the words ‘witch’ and ‘satan’ are mentioned more in this play than they are in Macbeth.’
(Richard II). ‘How did Shakespeare know how to write so brilliantly about people parting? Think of Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra … I wonder if it came from the pain of having to say goodbye to his wife, Anne, every time he left his home in Stratford to travel to London.’
(Antony and Cleopatra). ‘It’s not a standing-still part, Cleopatra, that’s for sure. She’s either lying down, rolling around, or darting about as if she’s in a pinball machine.’
(Romeo and Juliet). ‘The play goes at such a lick, doesn’t it? It hurtles along. There are so many references to speed: ‘Let Romeo hence in haste’, ‘Gallop apace’, ‘It is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden, / Too like the lightning.’ The whole piece has a headlong quality, an urgency. I remember I was always running.’
(Romeo and Juliet). ‘Juliet’s not lying, of course, but nor is she telling her mother everything. She’s equivocating. And the Elizabethans would have understood this double-speak, because equivocation was a technique used by Catholics to defend themselves against the Protestants. Say one thing to appease your Protestant accusers, whilst in your heart remaining true to your Catholic faith.’
‘John Barton always encouraged us to look for the contradictions in the characters. That’s what makes them three-dimensional.’
Then there’s the mischievous side of the way she sees the plays, still girlish in her delight. She’d like to see Miss Piggy play Phoebe in As You Like it. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream as Titania in her eagerness to get on stage she once knocked over several ballerinas in the fairy roles (‘They went down line ninepins’).
And she tells the story of how a production of King Lear used lychees as eyeballs in the Gloucester-gouging scene to be thrown away by Cornwall; they would tend to fly off and hit and stick to the proscenium arch:
A few nights into the run, I happened to glance up at the proscenium and saw all these eyeballs staring back at me. Stage management hadn’t removed them. I thought: That’s a bit of a giveaway. But it was very funny. When Trevor Nunn found out, he told us off because he knew it made us laugh, and John wasn’t allowed to throw them any more.
That’s pure Shakespeare: horror and hilarity intertwined. Such juxtapositions run all through this marvellous book.