It’s been almost three years since I last wrote a personal blogpost. It is no coincidence that my silence coincides with my appointment to a lectureship in Restoration and eighteenth-century literature at Newcastle University, a job whose challenges and rewards have left me little time for the kind of reflection this kind of writing represents. Yet they have left me a little time nonetheless: my phone contains a long list of potential blogpost topics, some elaborated and some left as just a single word; and, now, after three years and as a way of getting myself out of the rhythm of teaching and into the rhythms of research, I have finally made time to type out some thoughts. 

Today’s thoughts concern something said to me over dinner at the BSA’s annual conference in Belfast. I was preparing to give an after-dinner speech that would present my former headmaster, Roger Harcourt, before he received an honorary fellowship in recognition of a lifetimes achievement in the field of Shakespeare studies. I happened to be sitting next to Andrew Jarvis. Here is a terrible reconstruction of our conversation, in the style of Denis Diderot’s Paradoxe:

LUI: Do you like speaking in public?

MOI: Yes, I’ve discovered that I really enjoy lecturing. It feels like a privilege.

LUI: That’s good. It’s important to be humble about this. One thing you learn as an actor is that you have to earn an audience’s attention. I don’t think enough lecturers know that.

This dialogue got me thinking. Andrew has a point. During my PhD I attended a conference on anti-theatre at the Sorbonne, only to come to the realization that perhaps the most anti-theatrical element of that event was not the content of the papers but rather the form and delivery of some of them (you can my original about the conference here). Looking back on that event, I might be tempted now to say that some of the participants were not ‘earning’ the attention of their audience.

Yet Andrew and I were talking about lecturing, and the same thing can happen here. I certainly go to great lengths to earn the attention of my students, incorporating quizzes, role-play, short performances, music, and much else into the fifty or so minutes I spend presenting everything from A Midsummer Night’s Dream to Writing Machines to them. If I didn’t do such things, I would worry that I hadn’t done justice to my material, hadn’t conveyed why these works and ideas were so important.

Time for two counter-arguments. First, it’s important to think about how exactly one ‘earns’ an audience’s attention. If you are a novice actor, you don’t have many choices: you’ll earn attention through your performance of a part. But if you’re a famous performer, perhaps you’ve already earned attention before you start that evening’s show, and an audience is going to watch you like a hawk regardless of what you do that night. The same pertains in academia: a celebrated academic will draw attention easily, while a neophyte must make a case for a public to lend him or her their ears. On top of this, however, an academic speaker has additional advantages: you can earn attention through your work. The significance and quality of the research being presented can overcome both poor delivery and pre-existing reputation, and the attention paid to you is earned in the library rather than at the lectern.

Second, and more significantly, I want to challenge the language of ‘earning’ itself. Professional actors perform for money and there is a good case to be made for a correlation between their ability to attract our attention and their earning potential. Indeed, as I type this sentence I wonder whether our very modern, twenty-first century concept of an ‘attention economy‘ might profitably be extended into theatre history (but that is another post, and I’ve noted it in my phone). To say that a lecturer or an academic presenting research must ‘earn’ their audiences attention introduces the language of the market into something rather more complex. Earning attention is not the same as teaching someone. Indeed, it is easy enough to imagine a lecture or a conference paper that earns attention and yet does nothing to improve the knowledge or skills of its audience. I suppose, you might say that students (and attendees at a conference) have paid for the privilege of hearing the speaker, and so the speaker earns that money from them when they teach them something, but, then again, that money does not go directly to the speaker, and perhaps the learning does not even occur during the talk but several days or years afterwards.

There are more arguments to deploy here, but a blogpost is too short for them, even when i’m sketching them as briefly as I have been here. Andrew’s mention of ‘earning attention’ is useful as a demonstration of what a professional performer can (and cannot) teach us. At its heart, there is a good, but dangerous point here about being aware of your audience: that awareness is more complicated than such a transactional term as ‘earning’ might make it seem, but, equally, the very bluntness of the word has a provocative power that should not be dismissed, if only as a thing to think with.

Thanks for your attention!