Delightful reminiscences by Judy Dench as she relates her many, many roles in plays by “the man who pays the rent,” William Shakespeare. It helps to have a detailed knowledge of Shakespeare’s body of work—which I don’t—but the book tries to help the uninitiated reader catch up. And Dench is an iconoclast, never hesitating to break stereotypes about actors’ approaches to their work. She is not overly intellectual, nor is she at all a method actor, but has a workmanlike ethic about her craft, believing that an actor’s first duty is to bring to life what the writer put on the page, without reading too much into a character. And she offers some funny anecdotes about her years onstage, such as the time she dropped a suggestive note in the lap of a man in the front row, mistaking him for an old friend. Lovely spending time with her.