The Lecture as Theatre

Abstract

Two students arrived at the start of one of my Shakespeare lectures in 2009 and asked if they could take some time at the start to address the class. Where I work, at the University of Sydney, this is called a ‘lecture bash’ and can be used for a number of reasons — advertising forthcoming student drama productions, requesting volunteers for charity events and, most often, as hustings in student elections. This ‘bash’ was different though. One of the students put a photograph of his girlfriend up on the two large screens at the front of the lecture theatre and, supported by his friend, asked if anyone had seen this woman, a fellow member of the Shakespeare class, as she had apparently gone missing a few days earlier. They put up phone numbers for themselves and for the local police station in Glebe in case the students heard anything about her after the lecture. But then someone from the audience spoke out, shouting ‘She’s here!’, identifying the woman from the picture as sitting in the class. At that point the two men at the front leapt up into the lecture audience and the student who had thought he had lost his girlfriend was heard to say, ‘Her natural posture! / Chide me, that I may say indeed / Thou art Hermione’ as he approached the identified Shakespeare student.