David Hillman - Greetings, partings and the magic of Shakespeare

Greetings and partings are mini rituals that frame every encounter and condense emotional intensity into gestures and words.

About David Hillman "I lecture on Shakespeare and Renaissance culture at the University of Cambridge and direct studies at King’s College in Cambridge.

I'm the author of Shakespeare's Entrails, which is my first monograph. I've also written about Shakespeare and Freud; the history of the body in relation to Shakespeare in particular; Shakespeare and philosophy and epistemological issues around Shakespeare. I am currently completing a monograph, Greetings and Partings in Shakespeare and early modern England, which addresses the rich topic of salutary acts in Shakespeare and early modernity."

Key Points

• Greetings and partings are mini rituals that frame every encounter and condense emotional intensity into gestures and words. • The ways in which Shakespeare’s characters greet and part from one another are sometimes peculiarly resonant. • Moments of parting are when one is most aware of the potential for solitude, and therefore when one longs for connection.   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.

Mini rituals that frame encounters The way we greet and the way we part are essentially the same. We shake hands, we kiss, we hug, we wave. At least we used to do these things; we have elbow bumps now. But the same gestures and, often, the same words – “ciao”, “shalom” – are used at greeting and at parting. Even “adieu” is used as a greeting in France. So there must be an inherent relationship between the things that we are dealing with when greeting and when parting.

These are mini rituals that frame an encounter. It is all too easy to move beyond them, to start thinking about the meat of the encounter, and to forget that this has been framed by a greeting and by a parting. A lot goes on at these moments. They condense a huge amount into tiny gestures and the choice of words that are used.

Shakespeare knew this. His art involved constantly having people encounter one another – beginning scenes, ending scenes, sometimes entering scenes in medias res – but all the time, actors have to come into and move out of relation to each other. What a director does with those moments is quite important to a production.

When we greet or part from the other, when we encounter the other, the first decision takes place in almost no time at all. We have to decide: friend or foe? There’s a spectrum. Do we want to embrace the other, or do we want to kill the other? At the extreme ends, there’s a sex or death choice at that moment. We’re not aware of this most of the time; these moments are precisely designed as rituals to keep at bay the enormous emotional intensity of meeting another human being.