Lloyd Davis Memorial Fellowship
The University of Queensland created this Visiting Professorship for leading Shakespeare scholars in 2006, in memory of Associate Professor Lloyd Davis, who died in 2005.
In announcing the Visiting Professorship in 2005, then UQ Vice Chancellor Professor Hay, AC, said the following.
“UQ is committed to the long-term expansion of Shakespeare studies, to build on our international reputation for excellence and the momentum of next year's events. The Lloyd Davis Memorial Visiting Professorship will bring one major world scholar to UQ each year, beginning in 2006, to teach and share their scholarship with our own Shakespeareans.”
Lloyd Davis and Professor Richard Fotheringham secured the VIII World Shakespeare Congress held at Brisbane City Hall in July, 2006 for Brisbane and The University of Queensland.
2023 Professor Simon Palfrey, Oxford University
Island in a Pocket: Shakespeare's History of the World
They say there’s but five upon this Isle; we are three of them.
If the other two be brained like us, the State totters.
In this one-off lecture Simon Palfrey offers a new vision of Shakespeare’s history of the world. It is an epic journey from prehistoric beginnings to a conflict-torn imminent present. An empire’s fall may weigh no more than a dropped handkerchief: and a dropped handkerchief no less.
We dive deep into pasts as we are rushed into futures. Crises come fast. Distances shrink, and we find the sudden emergence of the new. The plays become audacious experiments in world-making. This also means experiments in making humans. Shakespeare takes nothing for granted, not even the fact of humankind. We see where things come from; more importantly, we see where they go. We live amid consequences: and we are responsible for them too. This is Shakespeare’s great subject. Another way of putting it is this: here is our unfinished tale of origin.
I think he will carry this island home in his pocket and give it his son for an apple.
And sowing the kernels of it in the sea, bring forth more islands.
About the Presenter
Simon Palfrey grew up in Toowoomba and Tasmania, left Australia on a Rhodes Scholarship, and is now Professor of English Literature at Oxford University. Described by Julia Lupton as one of “the great Shakespeare scholars of our age”, Palfrey’s books include Doing Shakespeare (a Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year), Shakespeare in Parts (with Tiffany Stern, Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society Book of the Year), Poor Tom: Living King Lear (a Choice American Library Society top recommendation), and Macbeth, Macbeth (with Ewan Fernie, praised as “a miracle, an instant classic” by Slavoj Žižek).
2022: Professor Rosalind Smith, University of Newcastle
Shakespeare's Book? The hunt for his personal library.
In her talk Rosalind will discuss a serendipitous find in the Emmerson collection of the State Library of Victoria: an unknown instance of the signature ‘William Shakespeare’ on the title page of one of its 5000 rare books. In a field littered with forgeries and false claims, how can such a signature be read? Is it possible that more evidence of Shakespeare’s library exists than previously thought, in private collections, or in collections that have only recently entered public hands, such as the John Emmerson bequest to the State Library of Victoria? This paper examines the signature and marginalia in the volume to assess whether this might be Shakespeare’s book, weighted against a long and intriguing history of ‘discovery,’ false claims, and forgery in the search for Shakespeare’s library. It considers the role that recent critical interest in marginalia plays in understanding cultures of book ownership, reading, imitation, and exchange, such as the discovery of John Milton’s annotations in Shakespeare’s First Folio in the Free Library of Philadelphia, and the part that Australian collections might contribute to these new material histories.
About the Presenter
Professor Rosalind Smith is Chair of English at the Australian National University, and director of the Centre for Early Modern Studies. A current ARC future fellow, she has published widely on gender, form, and politics in early modern women’s writing, and is lead CI on the ARC Linkage grant ‘Transforming the early modern archive: The Emmerson Collection at the State Library of Victoria.’
2021: Associate Professor Rob Pensalfini, University of Queensland
Wherefore should I stand in the plague of custom? - Re-democratising Shakespeare
A playwright for all classes and educational levels in his own time, William Shakespeare suffered relegation to elite status in the centuries after his death, and his name is now synonymous with high culture, privilege, and the torture of high school students. Rob will talk about the efforts of the Queensland Shakespeare Ensemble, UQ’s resident professional theatre company, to have Shakespeare recognised as The Simpsons of his day and to re-open the doors of Shakespeare production and performance to people of all classes and backgrounds, with an emphasis on the marginalised in particular. The talk will feature the Ensemble’s work with Shakespeare in Prisons and with at-risk and incarcerated youth but will also touch on a number of other projects, including Rob's research into accent and Shakespeare.
Wherefore should I stand in the plague of custom? - Re-democratising Shakespeare is open to all Shakespeare lovers and curious individuals wanting to know more about literature.
About the Presenter
Rob Pensalfini is the Associate Professor in Linguistics and Drama at the University of Queensland and the Artistic Director of the QSE. His linguistic research focuses on the structure of Australian Aboriginal languages, particularly those of the Barkly Tableland, on which he has written or co-authored five books and several dozen articles. As a drama scholar, Rob has published on actor training, Shakespeare performance in Australia, and prison theatre, including his 2016 book Prison Shakespeare: for these deep shames and great indignities.
In the theatre, Rob is an actor, director, teacher, composer, and musician. His directing credits include Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Comedy of Errors, As You Like It, The Blood Votes (by local playwright Michael Futcher) and Where the Wild Things Are for QSE, and, for QSE’s Shakespeare Prison Project, The Tempest, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, The Comedy of Errors and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Acting credits for QSE include Prospero, Falstaff, Leontes, Titus Andronicus, Sir Toby Belch, Feste, Touchstone, Coriolanus, Shylock, and Friar Laurence.
This year saw the publication of Rob’s first full-length play, Bogga, a verbatim piece drawing on oral histories of life and work in Brisbane’s notorious Boggo Road Gaol in the 1970s and 1980s.
Rob was inducted into the Queensland Culture Champions Hall of Fame in 2013 for his work both in the theatre and with indigenous languages.
2019: Professor Emeritus Michael Neill, University of Auckland
From Nothing to Never: Facing Death in King Lear
King Lear is a tragedy whose entire action is triangulated around three great negatives: ‘nothing’, ‘no cause’ and ‘never’. Anticipating Donne’s description of death as ‘the most inglorious and contemptible vilification, the…peremptory nullification of man’, Lear traces the undoing of a king forced to recognise the ‘smell of mortality’ upon his own sanctified hand, just as it shows a man reduced to a mere ‘ruined piece of nature’. Lear’s condition is construed as a kind of annihilation that reminds Gloucester of the Last Days in which ‘this great world / Shall…wear out to naught’ -- the nullity for which the insistently absent presence of 'Dover' has come to stand. Set against the fear of peremptory nullification is the promise of redemption in the sublime negatives of Cordelia’s repeated ‘no cause’, with its paradoxical reversal of the 'nothing' with which she precipitated the tragic action. The old man's appearance arrayed in fresh garments can even be seen as an apocalypse of the most literal sort – a discovery or revelation. But the play’s final scene becomes a travesty of apocalyptic visions: in the mock pietà of Lear cradling the dead Cordelia, Kent sees an ‘image’ of ‘the promised end’ whose ‘horror’ turns out to be a kind of horror vacui. Turning its back both on traditional moralisations of ending, and on the consolations of memorial artifice, the play confronts death as mere blankness -- the unbeing that the king recognises in the silence of his beloved daughter: 'Look on her, her lips, / Look there, look there!'
About the Presenter
Michael Neill is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Auckland and Professor of Early Modern Literature at the University of Kent. He is the author of Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy and Putting History to the Question. His editions include Antony and Cleopatra and Othello for the Oxford Shakespeare, Middleton’s The Changeling for New Mermaids, Massinger’s The Renegado for Arden Early Modern Drama and most recently The Duchess of Malfi for Norton. Professor Neill has also published many influential articles too numerous to list here. He is also an actor; he played the title role in King Lear in a 50th anniversary production for the University of Auckland’s Summer Shakespeare (2013).
2018: Professor Hugh Craig, University of Newcastle
Shakespeare and Statistics
Shakespeare and statistics is not an obvious pairing, but digital texts of his plays and poems are now widely available, and scholars are getting used to analysing them with computers. This lecture will reflect on what we have learned from these studies.
The best-known findings are about authorship. The 2016 New Oxford Shakespeare relies heavily on quantitative work and includes forty-two plays rather than the usual thirty-eight, and at the same time advances the idea of Shakespeare as a collaborator as well as a sole author.
The lecture will also discuss the discomfort many Shakespeareans feel at this quantitative turn in Shakespeare studies. Is something about literary study, or about the humanities, betrayed, when a ruthlessly numerical ruler is run over these works, which mean so much to so many? Computers can count, but they can’t read, so what finally can be learned from them? Are we in danger of being seduced by the quantitative because it is now possible, rather than because it is useful?
About the Presenter
Renaissance literature expert Professor Hugh Craig is a man of letters. But the computational stylist is equally a man of numbers.
Craig is the Director of the Centre for Linguistic and Literary Computing. He has been an advocate of computer-assisted analysis of language in literature since the controversial field began to emerge in the 1980s. He has devoted decades of research to proving that statistics can help us analyse and appreciate literary texts.
Historic List of Lloyd Davis Fellows
- 2023: Professor Simon Palfrey, Oxford University
- 2022: Professor Rosalind Smith, University of Newcastle
- 2021: Associate Professor Rob Pensalfini, University of Queensland
- 2020: Not award in 2020
- 2019: Professor Emeritus Michael Neill, University of Auckland
- 2018: Professor Hugh Craig, University of Newcastle
- 2017: Professor Ewan Fernie, University of Birmingham
- 2016: Professor John Wyver, University of Westminster
- 2015: Professor Dympna Callaghan, Syracuse University
- 2014: Professor Gil Harris, The George Washington University/Ashoka University
- 2013: Dr Farah Karim-Cooper, Shakespeare's Globe
- 2012: Professor Tom Bishop, University of Auckland
- 2011: Professor Richard Strier, University of Chicago
- 2010: Professor Lars Engle, University of Tulsa
- 2009: Professor Julie Sanders, University of Nottingham
- 2008: Professor Gordon McMullen, Professor of English, Kings College London
- 2007: Dr Paul Prescott, University of Warwick
- 2006: Professor Peter Donaldson, Massachusetts Institute of Technology