This is a transcript of a eulogy delivered today at St John`s College Chapel, St Lucia by UQ Executive Dean of the Arts Faculty Associate Professor Richard Fotheringham for Associate Professor Lloyd Davis, of the School of English, Media Studies and Art History.
Our colleague and friend Lloyd Davis died last Sunday, at about the time many of us were watching the thrilling final moments of the Australia-England cricket test match. Lloyd will be sorry to have missed it; he was a passionate cricket lover. He is survived by his wife, Julia Duffy, his children Charlotte and Joseph, his parents, Fred and Rachel, and by many, many friends.
Lloyd was 46, and in those crowded years of remarkable life he went further than most of us will go in four score years and twelve, if we are granted twice Lloyd’s allotted life span. But we are not just celebrating a life well lived; we are also mourning someone who deserved to live much longer, who could have achieved much more, and enjoyed far longer the love of Julia, his life’s companion; the joy of helping Charlotte and Joey on their journeys into adulthood, and the pleasures of rich companionship. In his life he had all those, and more; he was a supportive spouse who helped Julia aim high in her own career, a devoted father who stopped playing tennis with us because his home life and parenting duties came first, but who remained a genial guest and willing host to good company.
Lloyd came to the University of Queensland in 1990 after a career that began at the University of Sydney from where he won a scholarship to complete a PhD at the City University of New York. Alan Lawson told me with approval that at the first departmental social event after his arrival at UQ, he and Julia partied till 3am. (Well, they didn’t have children then.) As his career developed, Lloyd showed remarkable diversity: publishing, with Tony Thwaites and Warwick Mules, Tools for Cultural Studies in 1994, and, with Sue McKay, An Introduction to Academic Writing in 1996. He won the national Australian Universities’ Humanities Teacher of the Year Award for 1999, served as Arts Faculty Director of Studies for two years, and with three books published in his specialist area of Early Modern Literary Studies: Guise and Disguise: Rhetoric and Characterisation in the English Renaissance; then Sexuality and Gender in the English Renaissance; and most recently Shakespeare Matters, had become a major figure in that field world-wide.
Then, a year ago, he suddenly found that his life was under threat. He had just received two further book contracts for work on the English renaissance; had just been designated Head of the University of Queensland’s School of English, Media Studies and Art History, and had become President of ANZSA – the Australian and New Zealand Shakespeare Association – and he was working with me on the culmination of a dream we had shared since we co-convened the 1998 ANZSA Conference: hosting the 2006 World Shakespeare Congress here in Brisbane. In the terrible ups and downs of the months that followed, as hope and fear alternated with each succeeding diagnosis and prognosis, it seemed to me that he must have considered those terrible words of Edgar in King Lear, after the last losing battle: “Men must endure/ Their going hence, even as their coming hither;/ Ripeness is all”.
Lloyd was great fun to be with. I remember in particular one night in Valencia in Spain, the evening after he and I had bid successfully to stage the 2006 Shakespeare Congress, roaming round the old medieval town centre in search of an authentic Spanish eating and drinking experience - paella, rosé, gypsy dancing – and finishing up in a cheap Italian restaurant eating pizza and drinking German beer to Euro-pop musak. Some of you may know the sixteenth-century short play “The Four PPs” where four allegorical characters each has a name starting with “P”. We riffed on that idea, since the 2001 Valencia Congress had at that point been chiefly memorable for four different “P”s: pasta, paella, pickpockets and payola – the last to the conference organiser who had taken the start-up funds and absconded to Cuba, leaving behind the most disorganised conference we had ever been to. In fact, I think all we had to do in bidding for the 2006 Congress before the ISA executive, which was sitting in shock in the midst of this chaos, was to have the organising ability to find the interview room and look plausibly unlike thieves. Evidently we succeeded. Jill Levenson, the Chair of the International Shakespeare Association Congress Committee, suggested earlier this week that we use next year’s Congress as an opportunity to raise funds for some kind of ongoing memorial to Lloyd. I’ll talk to his family and immediate colleagues, and, if they agree, pursue that idea as vigorously as I can.
Searching for a way to describe some of the complexity of this charming, gentle man, I found myself strangely drawn to Lloyd’s complete lack of style at tennis. He held the racquet awkwardly and clearly never had a lesson in his life, and when you watched him from the sideline he looked an easy beat. Yet when you played against him, you suddenly realized that he managed to make his racquet meet the ball square on, watched it onto the middle of the strings, and pushed it to the side of the court where you weren’t. (Very irritating if you were his opponent.) When Lloyd returned to our School from the Director of Studies position and resumed classroom teaching, he borrowed a copy of a written guide I had to setting up a teaching website. “That wasn’t so difficult” he said a few hours later, returning the booklet. That was Lloyd: brilliant at many things; good at everything by the simple application of intelligence and good sense and willingness to try. When Peter Holbrook nobly agreed at very short notice to take over Lloyd’s classes last September, he found all the lectures prepared, the website material loaded, the course guide detailed and self-explanatory and the students motivated and teaching themselves. As the School’s Academic Administrator Sandra Gough said, “That’s so like Lloyd”.
In the last few days I have received many emails from all round the world, including from Professor Jill Levenson in Toronto, as I mentioned earlier, and from Roger Pringle at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon. The tributes mention Lloyd’s brilliance as a scholar, quick and quiet efficiency as an organiser, his distinguished contribution to many conferences and colloquia, and his enthusiasm and friendly manner. Tony Miller, Head of the English Department at the University of Sydney where Lloyd started his brilliant career, said “We would very much appreciate it if you could … make known our sense of loss and our admiration for Lloyd … He is very much a favourite son of this Department.” Philippa Kelly, who came here a few weeks ago from the USA to visit Lloyd, has sent a similar tribute by email, and copied it to a large number of Shakespeare scholars on several continents. She calls him “a colleague, a friend, a model of gentle discretion, and yet a marvelously humorous person as well”. Kay Elsden, writing to members of the English Teachers Association of Australia, has said “He was an incredibly generous friend who …, changed the lives of so many students because he placed a priority on making the products of his highly original research – and that of others – accessible to all students. … [He] generously supported secondary English teaching in Australia by visiting schools, presenting papers at teacher conferences, and writing articles on education for journals including English in Australia.” That quotation is from Kay’s written tribute which will appear in the next edition of that journal, and which concludes: “Lloyd will be remembered both for the significant body of work he leaves behind and for his great generosity and humanity.”
I began with King Lear; let me end with Hamlet. A story about a man who found himself in a terrible situation he could not escape and which in the end cost him his life. Horatio says to the assembled multitude: “He was likely, had he been put on,/ To have proved most royal”. Earlier, mourning over the body of his dead friend, he laments: “Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet Prince,/ And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.”
Thank you.
