‘O, these encounterers’: on Shakespeare’s meetings and partings

Summary

Moments of meeting and parting, in Shakespeare as elsewhere, are powerfully charged. Each joining or separation is a unique event. The coming together or parting of two characters is invariably a moment of great uncertainty at which there is the potential for something new (whether destructive or creative): however familiar the other may be, new possibilities unfold with each meeting; however short the interval between this meeting and the projected next one, new dangers subtend any separation. No-one can ever be sure that something unexpected will not take place in the interim; this might be the last time these two characters will meet on these precise terms (if at all).

Opening gambits and parting shots can tell us a great deal. One could, if one wished, read into the moment of first meeting the future development of the essential part of a relation; here we could make helpful use of Kenneth Burke's notion of the 'entelechial principle'- the thorough working-out of the implications intrinsic to any beginning. And if one can read all such moments as instances of 'prophetic greeting' (Macbeth, 1.3.76), one can also see in the form a parting takes a consummation of everything that has preceded it, reading backwards from the eventual ending or telos - what Burke called 'prophesying after the event'. One might even think of the entire development of a relation as contained in the seeds present at its very beginning - as a long drawn-out processing of what has taken place in those first few moments - and of a parting as a recapitulation or re-enactment of all that has gone before.