Second Chances

Two voices work through the same plays here: Stephen Greenblatt, a literary scholar, and Adam Phillips, a psychoanalyst, whose Yale seminar became this book. They read Shakespeare next to Freud on a single preoccupation, the wish to begin again and the trouble that wish causes.

The chapters move across the genres. Comedies such as As You Like It hand their characters a fresh start; tragedies including Othello and King Lear show renewal offered and refused; the late romances, above all The Winter's Tale, stage the return of what seemed lost for good. Running under all of them is the observation that people undo their own chances, wanting change and resisting it at once.

For the clinician, the value lies in how the authors treat a life as something told and retold. They watch characters revise their stories, and they read comic survival as a matter of resilience and tolerance of uncertainty rather than insight.