The Marriage of True Minds

All the best criticism takes the form of conversation, or what the philosopher Stanley Cavell called “a natural extension of conversation.” It’s hard to say anything about anything unless you’ve entered into some kind of dialogic relationship with it, and it’s hard to write anything worthwhile unless you’re willing to enter into a similar relationship with your reader. Cavell found conversation constitutive not only of those critical relationships but also of one of his critical objects, the “comedy of remarriage”: Hollywood films of the 1930s and ’40s where a divorced or separated couple, played more than once by Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant, reunite after relearning how to talk to each other. Those films — which Cavell argues are themselves in conversation with Shakespearean “romantic comedies” as well as with John Milton’s prose tracts on divorce — follow fast-talking dames and the mugs who try to keep up, smooth-talking newspapermen and the girls who give them a rough time. They talk each other up; they talk each other down. They break up when they talk themselves out of it; they make up when they talk themselves back into it. The first marriage is a tragedy, the second is a rom com; the first is the worst, the second time’s the charm.

At the beginning of Second Chances: Shakespeare and Freud, co-written by the Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt and the psychoanalyst and essayist Adam Phillips, Greenblatt explicitly frames their joint project in conversational terms. The plan was that they would write their chapters independently — Greenblatt wrote the introduction and the four chapters on Shakespeare, Phillips the three chapters on Freud and the conclusion — but “collaborate and consult with each other” throughout the process. Greenblatt and Phillips would each bring perceptions drawn from their long careers in analyzing texts and analyzing patients, respectively, to bear on the other’s remarks on the theme of “second chances.” Thus the co-authors “would each serve as the other’s second chance,” allowing them to take a second look at what they’d each seen so many times before. That both still seem somewhat stuck in old ways goes to show that it’s as easy to talk past each other as to each other. Sometimes this book made me exclaim, like Cary Grant in The Philadelphia Story talking Katharine Hepburn out of panicked inarticulacy and back into his arms: “That’s no good, that’s not even conversation.”

Let me start over. What is a “second chance”? You could say it’s redemption, or rehabilitation, or restoration, or recovery. Often, it’s a recovery following what feels like irreparable loss, a recovery made possible by divine grace, luck, or forgiveness. Most of all, it’s an opportunity made possible by narrative art, which allows us to experience renewal, as the child begs the parent reading the bedtime story, again, and again, and again.

The book’s chapters, with titles like “Shakespeare’s Second Chance,” “Come Again: On Second Chances,” and “Second Chances: For and Against,” proceed somewhat recursively, as befitting their subject. (Neither author ever misses a chance to use the phrase “second chance.”) Greenblatt’s section is loosely organized by Shakespearean genre: comedy, tragedy, history, and romance. In Chapter 1, the comedic second chance is represented by the ending of Twelfth Night, where Sebastian and Viola, twins separated at shipwreck who presume the other dead, come to recognize each other through a ridiculously “slow-motion” dialogue. (“Do not embrace me till each circumstance / Of place, time, fortune do cohere and jump / That I am Viola,” Viola warns Sebastian, 25 lines after the circumstances pretty much cohered and jumped.) “It is as if the pieces are being painstakingly glued together in order to reconstitute the cracked vessel,” Greenblatt comments. “Once the job is complete, it will be as if nothing had ever been broken.” In the end, all is as good as new.

In Shakespearean tragedy — the subject of Greenblatt’s second chapter — there are no second chances, as the painful ending of King Lear, with Lear desperately scanning Cordelia’s corpse for signs of life right before he dies, makes cruelly clear. Chapter 3 makes an example out of Hal, the juvenile-delinquent prince whose partying in the Henriad represents one kind of second chance: Clowning around with Falstaff at the tavern, the royal heir gets to shed the trappings of court and become one of the guys. But what Hal starts to see as his real “second chance” is the rebalancing act that will one day come when he decides to sober up, settle down, and step into the serious work of kingship. “When this loose behavior I throw off,” he explains, he can begin his “reformation, glittering o’er my fault,” the work of “redeeming time.” Lord, give me a second chance — but not yet!

But the genre par excellence of the second chance may be Shakespearean romance. Unlike comedy, which indulges the fantasy of perfect recovery, romance confronts us with the reality of imperfect recovery, a reality we nonetheless experience as magical. As Greenblatt explains of The Winter’s Tale, in contrast to Twelfth Night, “this is not a comedy, in which the pieces will miraculously be put together exactly as they were before they were scattered and seemingly lost.” The protagonist Leontes’s son has died; he missed out on the childhood of his daughter, the aptly named Perdita; his wife, miraculously alive years after her presumed death, may forgive his murderously jealous cruelty, but she will not forget.

Greenblatt is a genial tour guide through these Shakespearean monuments. His half of Second Chances reanimates some of the most famous works in English by — you guessed it — putting them in conversation with each other: making Hal rub elbows with Antony, seating Leontes next to Viola at Prospero’s magic banquet. He has the pedagogical gift of imparting knowledge in a way that feels like a pleasant reminder of something you already knew, whether or not you actually already knew it. When he quotes a line he must have quoted (and that some readers will have read) a thousand times before, it feels like the first time, re-enchanted by a deft curatorial hand. His analyses help us see not only how artists “reproduce” the longing for a second chance “again and again in symbolic form,” but how critics reproduce that longing, too.

Adam Phillips answers Greenblatt’s breezy erudition with easy sententiousness. His style is at once airy and lapidary, like what a tweet would sound like if the character limit on X (formerly Twitter) were not 280 but 28,000. He begins his section of the book with a retrospective redefinition of the second chance (rehearsal, recovery, revision, repair), recovering some of Greenblatt’s ground with his own takes on Shakespeare’s comedies and his tragic heroes, a longtime preoccupation in Phillips’s work. His diagnoses of characters like Macbeth and Othello repeat the insights of his recently published On Giving Up: Refusing to give up, which sounds so noble, can be a way of cheating yourself of a second chance, a cowardly self-condemnation to a life you don’t need to live. Tragic heroes are terrible conversation partners, because they can’t admit of another point of view. This is especially true of what might be called tragedies of remarriage, of which Othello is exemplary, where one member of the couple cuts off any meaningful conversation with the other and with it any hope of repair: “Shakespeare’s tragic heroes believe — need to believe — that in love there can be no second chances,” “that disillusionment with the women they love is terminal.”

Phillips’s writing is full of redundant reformulations and parenthetical qualifications, self-consciously mimetic of how “the redescriptions of psychoanalysis” offer our instinctual life a second chance. Psychoanalysis, Freud hoped, could recast as revisable what seems to be set in stone, and Freud himself, Phillips notes, was “always writing and rewriting about revision and repair.” One way to describe a second chance is, after all, as redescription: A new life often requires new language, a new narrative. Sometimes what we just said already needs to be said again, but better. “For there to be a second chance there has to be a critic — a revisionary critic,” Phillips writes, critically revising the first half of his sentence. As he puts it in Chapter 6, devoted to Freud and Proust, “the whole idea of second chances makes us, unavoidably, the historians, the interpreters, the readers” — historians, interpreters, and readers? in this narrative economy? — “of our own pasts.”

While Phillips’s retrospective mode is one of stylistic revision, Greenblatt’s is of vague musing about the rupture in his life that led to his own “second chance.” Lingering on “the scent of eucalyptus mingled with tear gas” as a metonym for the University of California at Berkeley campus, Greenblatt thinks back on the circumstances that led him to leave one prestigious university for another, one coastal city for another, one name (Steve) for another (the rather similar Stephen), one reading audience (scholarly) for another (popular), and one wife for another (a graduate student). “To what extent was this change of course a matter of chance, arbitrary, accidental, and unearned, and to what extent was I in control?” he asks as blandly as a product manager defending his rollout strategy. “What was I looking to gain, and what were the costs?” In Shakespeare, a second chance doesn’t usually look much like a job offer from Harvard, and when he offers a character a second life, it doesn’t usually come with a second, younger wife; for Leontes in The Winter’s Tale, as in the Shakespearean films that enchanted Cavell, it means ending back up with the same old wife, made new. (Phillips makes a similar elision, making Cavellian “remarriage” — which doesn’t have to be a marriage but does, crucially, have to involve the same person — sound as if it could refer to any “second marriage.”) With Freud peering over his glasses at us from Chapters 5 to 7, it’s hard not to wonder why Greenblatt is so insistent on putting his autobiography in conversation with Shakespeare’s plots, and yet so resistant to anything but a pat synopsis of his life’s pleasing symmetry.

Greenblatt might resemble that remark. While Shakespeare and Freud — “the supreme virtuoso of the second chance,” as Greenblatt puts it, and “its supreme interpreter” — are in a sense a match made in heaven, they’re also an odd couple. Greenblatt, like many of his fellow New Historicists in the 1980s and ’90s, has been outspoken over the years in his contempt for Freud. In 1990 he dismissed psychoanalysis as hopelessly limited by its “romantic assumption” about the coherence of the self, what he called, riffing on Wordsworth, “the faith that the child is the father of the man and that one’s days are bound each to each in biological necessity.” This assumption, Greenblatt argued, wasn’t shared by Renaissance Europeans, who understood the self as a product of property and social relations rather than an essential substrate. The attachment of psychoanalysis to a static, inadequately historicized idea of the self makes it not only fatally incurious about the past but also dully predictable in its conclusions, as useless for understanding our own world as it is for understanding Shakespeare’s. As Greenblatt put it in a 1998 New York Times book review, “Freud set psychotherapy on a course that almost always hints in the same direction, invariably rounding up the usual suspects, pointing to the same very small set of motives.” (The author of the book under review? Adam Phillips.) But Greenblatt has now evidently given Freud a second chance, even if his gestures toward him often have the effect of reminding us that Shakespeare got there first, in confirmation of Greenblatt’s earlier dismissive views. The child may indeed be the father of the man.

Phillips, too, is a suspiciously selective reader. In the chapter on Freud and Proust, he offers the helpful heuristic that while both were believers in the second chance, only Freud thought it was something we should, or could, actively seek out through psychoanalytic treatment. The Proustian second chance can come only by accident, like the unexpected evocation of Combray from a madeleine dipped in tea. The madeleine episode, familiar to every reader (as well as many non-readers) of Proust, is the sole passage Phillips quotes from the 3,000-odd pages of In Search of Lost Time. Perhaps he believes good textual evidence can no more be actively sought out than involuntary memory. But like a clever but lazy student sight-reading a passage on an exam without having done any of the reading, Phillips manages to say something insightful about this remarkably obvious example. The first second chance in Proust’s novel, Phillips points out, is itself the product of a lucky second thought: The narrator at first declines the fateful pastry, only to decide to partake after all.

“We create and re-create ourselves in dialogue,” Phillips avers near the end of Second Chances, echoing the sentiments of dialogists from Plato to Milton to Cary Grant. In comedies of remarriage, once the talking stage is over, so is the relationship; but talking is also the cure that leads to its recovery. For Greenblatt and Phillips, words come easily — perhaps too easily. This is Phillips’s 28th book, Greenblatt’s 14th. Phillips seems to take perverse pleasure in frequently noting, in his many lectures and podcast appearances, that he doesn’t work hard at his writing: He simply sits down one day a week and writes. What so many readers admire about Phillips is his conversational style, but it can feel almost literally phoned in, like you’re in the middle of a teletherapy session with an analyst who’s repeating his set pieces by rote. Talk is cheap; writing, in theory, is more valuable because it has been carefully composed, designed to stand the test of time, perhaps even to redeem time. The text of this book was originally given as the Anthony Hecht Lectures in the Humanities at Bard College (though no mention is made of this in Greenblatt’s account of their pre-writing process, or anywhere else in the text). It might have benefited from the second chance that those of us for whom writing doesn’t come so easily call a second draft.