Dame Judi Dench leaves fans stunned as she recites Shakespeare's sonnet on The Graham Norton Show

Skyfall star Judi Dench delivered a beautiful rendition of Shakespeare's Sonnet 29 leaving talk show host and audience stunned

James Bond star Dame Judi Dench left the audience speechless after she recited William Shakespeare's Sonnet 29 from memory on The Graham Norton Show. On Friday night, October 27, Dench appeared on the talk show to promote her new memoir- Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays The Rent. The 88-year-old legendary actress beautifully performed her rendition of the ballad. Talking about her memoir on the show, where she was present alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jack Whitehall and Jay Blade, Dench said, “Michael [her late husband Michael Williams] and I were both in Shakespeare plays for four years when we first met so he literally was paying our rent.”

Actor Judi Dench poses at the BAFTA Los Angeles Britannia Awards at the Beverly Hilton hotel in Beverly Hills, California October 30, 2014. (Reuters)

When the talk show host Norton asked the Skyfall star about Shakespeare's influence in her life, she said, “We don’t realise, Graham. We quote Shakespeare all the time, perhaps without knowing it.” Later on, when Norton was challenged by Whitehall to quote the literature icon, the audience gasped with shock, when he quoted Hamlet's soliloquy in Act 4, Scene 4- “How all occasions do inform against me.” He then went on to challenge Dench, who recited Sonnet 29, from her memory -

“When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast state, And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries, And look upon myself and curse my fate, Wishing me like to one more rich in hope, Featured like him, like him with friends possessed, Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope, With what I most enjoy contented least; Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising, Haply I think on thee, and then my state, (Like to the lark at break of day arising from sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate; For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings, That then I scorn to change my state with kings.”