Greetings, partings and the magic of Shakespeare

Hellos and goodbyes are my current topic of main research, and it turns out that this is a remarkably apt topic for our times. We’re all changing the way we greet and part from each other; we are all dying to hug each other but aware that a hug can lead to our dying.

We’re at a very interesting moment in relation to greetings and partings. This is a topic that people have not written much about. There’s a certain amount of writing in psychoanalytic literature about partings, especially about endings. Anthropologists are more interested in greetings, gestures and rituals of encounter; however, almost nobody has written about both of them together.

The ways in which Shakespeare’s characters greet and part from one another are sometimes peculiarly resonant. Sometimes they seem to go under the surface, but think of the way that the ghost of old Hamlet, Hamlet’s father, parts from Hamlet: ‘Adieu, adieu, adieu. Remember me.’ Hamlet repeats this a few lines later: ‘Now to my word; / It is “Adieu, adieu. Remember me.”’ He remembers it – in fact, he misremembers it, so he quotes it twice instead of three times. Does that matter? I think it does. Old Hamlet was unable at his death to part from his son, so there is a need to emphasise this parting when he does part from him.

Juliet says, ‘Parting is such sweet sorrow’, a famous phrase that Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, recently repeated in talking about Brexit. Characters in Shakespeare talk about greetings and partings, but they also just do them in ways that illuminate why a character chooses to say “adieu” rather than “farewell” rather than “goodbye”, or “hello” rather than “welcome”.

In Troilus and Cressida, the character Ulysses says: ‘welcome ever smiles, / And farewell goes out sighing.’ One way of interpreting this is to say that greetings are an embrace of otherness, and it is sad to say goodbye. But these words can also be taken to reveal the bared teeth in the smile, and the sigh of relief at parting. Parting is a sadness, but there’s also relief. There are a lot of different emotions going on at every turn of a greeting and a parting.

The impetus to explain Shakespeare’s magic, the way he affects audiences, is symptomatic of an attempt to pin down something that is essentially not right to pin down. Let’s think about the ending of The Winter’s Tale and the effect of Hermione coming alive on stage from being a statue, apparently. This is a moment that almost invariably affects audiences powerfully, but it only affects them powerfully if they are willing to let go of a scratching away at the truth about this scene.

Was Hermione really dead? What is the status of those 16 years that have passed between her death and resurrection? Has she been hidden away by Paulina in some chapel? If we try to get answers to those questions, the effect of the scene falls away. We are too invested in knowing. If we accept that this is something we cannot know – that this is simply to be received by our emotions, by our bodies – then the scene comes to life, and that allows Hermione to come to life.

Leontes says: ‘If this be magic, let it be an art / Lawful as eating.’ When you eat something, you don’t want to know its molecular structure. You don’t want to know everything about where that piece of food came from. You take it in.

Shakespeare’s theatre works in a way that allows us to shed our drive to know, our epistemophilic instinct, as the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein calls it. It allows us to shed that irritation with perplexity. John Keats praised Shakespeare for having negative capability – the ability to let go of the irritation felt about perplexities, uncertainties, doubts. Negative capability is what Shakespeare allows us to feel. That may be the closest we can come to explaining how his plays work.