Judi Dench: Bad teaching put me off Shakespeare play for life She said she has a lifelong hatred of the Merchant of Venice after being taught it badly at school, being made to read lines monotonously in turn. "I remember having to read in a class and them saying you have to read six lines each," she said. Six lines each of the ghastly Merchant of Venice, regardless of who was saying them. It made it a complete nonsense. I never liked the play and I should never have played Portia - there, I've said it. It ruined the play for me, completely ruined the play. Of how to teach it properly, she added: "But if you say to a child, have you fallen in love with somebody or know what the feeling of love is? Or have you ever envied somebody something, a toy? Have you ever got really angry about something? That's what Shakespeare's about, all of those things. He says it better than anybody else. Dame Judi appeared in the Merchant of Venice with the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1970; one of her many roles with the company. When asked why she disliked it so much, decades later, she added: "It's killer. They all behave too badly in that, everybody behaves badly. But it's because it was ruined for me at school, it's because of that I think. On the subject of why Shakespeare is seen as intimidating by some people, Dame Judi said: "It's a fear, there's a terrible fear about Shakespeare that it's a language we don't understand. [But] it couldn't be easier. It's the prejudice of things. Somebody telling you it's hard, and the fear that you're not going to understand it. You're not going to be able to understand? Well that's up to the actor. The actress fell in love with Shakespeare at a young age after seeing her older brothers on stage, with her parents encouraging the whole family into the world of theatre. She attended the Quaker Mount School in York, going on to perform in school plays. Dame Judi is not the first to emphasise the importance of not putting children off Shakespeare with dry teaching. Earlier this year, the Duchess of Cornwall praised the Shakespeare Schools Festival, saying: "What's so amazing about this is that, as we probably all know, when you're confronted with Shakespeare when you're very young you think: "Oh dear, this is not going to be very interesting, boring Shakespeare, please don't ask me to read it." But being able to act it like this makes them understand Shakespeare. Gregory Doran, artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company has argued children as young as five can fall in love with the Bard if they see lively performances to bring the language to life. "If you're reading Shakespeare you can get baffled by the language, but if you see actors deliver it with passion and engagement, even if you don't pick up every word, you can follow a story and be transported to a different world," he said. The full interview with Dame Judi is available on the new Globe Player, where films from Shakespeare's Globe are now available to the public.