Listen to Judi Dench's New Book: 'Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent' (Exclusive)

Dame Judi Dench, 89, has loved Shakespeare longer than many of us have been alive.

“Shakespeare is my passion,” Dench told PEOPLE in this weeks issue. “It used to be nine pence to go to the Old Vic and sit in the gallery, so we used to go and see Richard Burton and John Neville. This was before the Beatles, so the people used to just go mad. I never thought for one single second I would be part of that as my first job.”

Dench performed in nearly 40 of the Bard's plays over her time with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and she can still remember quite a few of them in vivid detail. Over four years, she and her co-author Brendan O'Hea sat down and talked through some of the celebrated actress' most iconic roles.

Those conversations — including anecdotes about Dench's mischievous hijinks backstage with her fellow cast members, the costumes and set pieces she loved the most, why she loves performing onstage and hates The Merchant of Venice and recollections featuring some of the most iconic names in theater — became their new book, Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent.

"I hadn't realized, until we came to talk about it, how many plays I'd done and parts I'd done," Dench says. " I can't remember what I did yesterday, but I can remember A Midsummer Night's Dream, or a Twelfth Night or a few sonnets. That I can remember."

The audiobook version, a portion of which you can hear now below, is read by Barbara Flynn, Brendan O'Hea and Dench. The audiobook also includes interstitial narration from Dench and a bonus conversation between the authors.

Dench, who says she prefers the stage to the screen, especially loves the process of bringing Shakespeare's work to life, and the group effort that requires. "[A play is] a relationship between you and the audience," she explains. "And you, of course, and the other actors and the director. But then, ultimately to the audience, it's a present."

For more on Judi Dench and her acting process, pick up the latest issue of PEOPLE, on newsstands Friday, or subscribe here.

"We're in the service of the author. And then, but more importantly, in the service to the audience," Dench continues. "And that's why it can't stop with us as actors or directors. We're there to communicate [Shakespeare's] words."

Below, read — and listen to — an exclusive excerpt from the book, in which Dench experiences the magic of Shakespeare's hometown.

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My parents took me [to Stratford-upon-Avon, William Shakespeare’s birthplace] in 1953, when
I was 18 years old, to see Michael Redgrave as King Lear, and I had one of those Damascene moments.

Up until then, I had always dreamed of being a theatre designer, but whenI saw Robert Colquhoun’s Lear set, I realised that I would never be able to come up with something as imaginative.

It was so spare and perfect—it looked like a great big poppadom, with a large rock in the middle, which, when it turned, could reveal the throne, a bed or a cave.

Nothing was held up for a scene change—it was all there in front of you, like a box of tricks waiting to be unveiled.

We stayed overnight in Stratford and the following afternoon my parents and I sat across from the theatre on the other side of the river. It was the summer and the theatre doors and windows were all open, and we heard the matinee over the tannoy and watched the actors running up and down the stairs to their dressing rooms.

Little did I know that within 10 years, I’d be stepping on to that stage to play Titania.

Excerpted from Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent, copyright © 2024 by Judi Dench and Brendan O’Hea, with permission from St. Martin’s Press.

Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent by Judi Dench and Brendan O'Hea is on sale April 23, and is available for preorder now, wherever books are sold.