A powerful exploration of the human capacity for renewal, as depicted through Shakespeare and Freud. In this new study, Stephen Greenblatt and Adam Phillips explore how the second chance has been a fundamental feature of literary imagination and a promise so central to our existence that we try to recreate it again and again. Countless stories, from the Homeric epics to the New Testament, and from Oedipus to Hamlet, explore the realization or failure of second chances—outcomes dependent on chance, wills, or fate. These stories allow us to 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 arises from understanding that some damage can never be repaired.

Through a series of enlightened readings, the authors show how Shakespeare was the ultimate virtuoso of the second chance and Freud the ultimate interpreter of it. Both believed that we can narrate the stories of our lives as tales of transformation, with decisive changes, bound by time and place, but often achievable. From The Comedy of Errors to The Winter's Tale, and from D. W. Winnicott to Marcel Proust, the authors urge readers to imagine how, as Phillips writes, “what matters is the repair.”