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Second Chances: Shakespeare and Freud is a collaboration between two late-career writers, Stephen Greenblatt, a Pulitzer Prize winner whose Will in the World (2004) is probably the most widely read biography of Shakespeare, and Adam Phillips, a prominent British essayist writing about psychoanalysis. Greenblatt authored the first four chapters, Phillips the second half of the book. Both are fluent stylists, although their styles differ, Greenblatt preferring storytelling from a moral perspective, Phillips exploring “the essential and far-reaching ambiguity of simple idea[s]” (Phillips 2024, 3). The book is derived from a 2022 public lecture series at Bard College in rural New York. I imagine that its audience consisted mostly of undergraduate students, faculty, and members of the outside community, not psychoanalytic interpreters of Shakespeare whose contributions over more than a century, from Freud to the present, are entirely absent, to the book’s detriment.
Second Chances aims to show “that Shakespeare dramatized and Freud diagnosed … the second chances of their times” (25). They announce a simple contrast at the beginning: “where Freud wants to interrupt, or disrupt or put a stop to a drama of human suffering, Shakespeare wants to show us what it might be to see it all the way through” (25–26). Rather than directly speaking to one another’s contributions, however, the two authors largely present different versions of the book’s theme in parallel, with too little carefully developed integrating tissue. The paratactical “and” between Shakespeare and psychoanalysis promises an exploration of the interplay between these dramatic and theoretical forms of understanding, but each author remains, with a few exceptions, almost entirely in his own field, giving his versions of the theme and often missing methods and meanings that psychoanalytic interpretations of Shakespeare at their best have explored. Nevertheless, Greenblatt’s deft and detailed, though selective, plot