At the heart of Shakespeare’s comedies is the dream of recovering a first chance ‒ a family or precious love that seemed to be forever lost. At the heart of his tragedies is the absence of a second chance, or rather, it is this absence conjoined with an unbearably intense, unrealizable desire for one. Toward the end of his career, Shakespeare experimented with the possibility of giving his characters the second chance for which they longed.
Stephen Greenblatt, a Holberg Prize Laureate and a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner, is John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. He is one of today’s most distinguished Shakespeare scholars. His latest book, co-authored with Adam Phillips, is Second Chances: Shakespeare and Freud (Yale University Press, 2024).
The lecture was delivered on 21 February 2024.