Dame Judi blasts ‘woke’ changes to Shakespeare
Sycamore seedling brings a tear to tree-lover’s eye
DAME Judi Dench has hit out at people changing the works of William Shakespeare to comply with “woke” culture.
The actress, 89, who started her illustrious career performing his plays in the 1950s, says there is no need to modernise classics such as Macbeth, Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet.
She said: “I don’t like people changing things in Shakespeare. I don’t like people changing the King James Bible.
“It is because I learned so much of it. You don’t have to modernise the Bible, do you? You don’t have to modernise all those things.”
The As Time Goes By star added that the Bard also helped her and late husband Michael Williams early in their acting careers.
She said: “Michael and I used to call Shakespeare the man who paid the rent, because he did.
“I was at The Vic for four years from 1957 and then I was at Stratford, and Mikey was at Stratford too, so
Shakespeare was the man who paid the rent. Our house was paid for by Clover butter [TV ads].”
The acting legend, who played M in the James Bond franchise alongside
Pierce Brosnan and then Daniel Craig as 007, has previously played several of Shakespeare’s iconic female leads, including Ophelia in Hamlet,
‘You don’t have to modernise the Bible’
Juliet in Romeo and Juliet, and Lady Macbeth in Macbeth.
She said: “I quite agree that we have to teach Shakespeare in schools and also the fact that it is not a foreign language.
“Some sweet girl about 13 or 14 came to my house recently and said ‘I am going for the first time to see Shakespeare? Is it in that funny language?’. So I said ‘Don’t think of it like that because it is not’. Some of the things that we say every day, expressions we use every day, don’t think of it as being foreign.
“It is things we all know about – like love, envy, jealousy, compassion. It is everything we know. We quote him all the time without realising.”
Despite having some memory issues, Dame
Judi can remember all of Shakespeare’s lines: “All I can say is that I cannot remember what I am doing tomorrow. I actually can’t.
“I can’t remember what I have to do next week but I can remember the whole of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Twelfth Night. It is something to do with rhythm. Maybe if I wrote it down I would be able to remember.”
And Dame Judi, who has age-related macular degeneration, added: “God, I can’t see any more now, so I can’t see what is in the diary either.”
DAME Judi welled up as she was presented with a seedling from the felled Sycamore Gap tree at the Chelsea Flower Show.
The popular landmark in a dip next to Hadrian’s Wall in Northumberland was chopped down last year.
The 89-year-old wiped a tear from her eye when seven-year-old Charlotte Crowe, of Henshaw Primary School, just a few miles from where the tree stood, gifted her the seedling, which was planted in the Octavia Hill garden at the show.
Dame Judi, who is said to be “passionate” about trees, said: “I’ll be naming him Antoninus, the adopted son of the Emperor Hadrian.”