AUDIOBOOK
About
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 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."