Publisher Description
A powerful exploration of the human capacity for renewal, as seen through Shakespeare and Freud In this fresh investigation, Stephen Greenblatt and Adam Phillips explore how the second chance has been an essential feature of the literary imagination and a promise so central to our existence that we try to reproduce it again and again. Innumerable stories, from the Homeric epics to the New Testament, and from Oedipus Rex to Hamlet, explore the realization or failure of second chances—outcomes that depend on accident, acts of will, or fate. Such stories let us repeatedly rehearse the experience of loss and recovery: to know the joy that comes with a renewal of love and pleasure and to face the pain that comes with realizing that some damage can never be undone. Through a series of illuminating readings, the authors show how Shakespeare was the supreme virtuoso of the second chance and Freud was its supreme interpreter. Both Shakespeare and Freud believed that we can narrate our life stories as tales of transformation, of momentous shifts, constrained by time and place but often still possible. Ranging from The Comedy of Errors to The Winter’s Tale, and from D. W. Winnicott to Marcel Proust, the authors challenge readers to imagine how, as Phillips writes, “it is the mending that matters.”“In this scintillating collaboration between our leading Shakespearean and our most trenchant interpreter of Freud, the concept of the second chance keeps gathering momentum and reach. Second Chances is intellectually nimble and emotionally wise.”—Christopher Benfey, author of A Summer of Hummingbirds
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About the Authors
Stephen Greenblatt, PhD, is Cogan
University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. General editor of The
Norton Shakespeare, he is also the author of several books. He has edited
seven collections of criticism, including Cultural Mobility: A
Manifesto, and is a founding coeditor of the journal Representations.
His honors include the MLA’s James Russell Lowell Prize for Shakespearean
Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England, the
Distinguished Humanist Award from the Mellon Foundation, the Wilbur Cross Medal
from the Yale University Graduate School, the William Shakespeare Award for
Classical Theatre, the Erasmus Institute Prize, two Guggenheim Fellowships, and
the Distinguished Teaching Award from the University of California, Berkeley.
He was president of the Modern Language Association of America and is a fellow
of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical
Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Adam Phillips is one of the foremost psychoanalysts practicing in the world today, and a visiting professor in the English department at the University of York. He is the author of many books, including On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored and On Balance. He is also coauthor, with the historian Barbara Taylor, of On Kindness.
About the Narrators
Donald Corren is an audiobook narrator and a New York actor with leading credits on and Off-Broadway, as well as numerous television appearances. On Broadway, he costarred with Judy Kaye in the critically acclaimed production of Souvenir, and replaced Harvey Fierstein in the seminal production of Torch Song Trilogy. His Off-Broadway appearances include The Soap Myth, Dietrich & Chevalier, The Last Sunday in June, Stephen Sondheim’s Saturday Night, and the original New York production of Tomfoolery. His television credits include eight seasons as forensic tech Medill on NBC’s Law & Order, as well as his current role as Dr. Kurian on Syfy’s Z Nation.
Steven Crossley, a graduate of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, has built a career on both sides of the Atlantic as an actor and audiobook narrator, for which he has won more than a dozen AudioFile Earphones Awards and been a nominee for the prestigious Audie Award. He is a member of the internationally renowned theater company Complicite and has appeared in numerous theater, television, film, and radio dramas.