Early in Second Chances, his collaboration with the psychoanalyst and writer Adam Phillips, Stephen Greenblatt gives a frankly personal account of the way his life has been divided: teaching and living in California, then at Harvard; a change from an academic writing style to one more tuned to a general audience; two marriages; and two versions of his name, Steve in his old life and Stephen in his present one. (There was a third version, Stevie, when he was a child.) This introduces his study of the way characters in Shakespeare are presented with second chances in life, and what happens when they take, or fail to take, those chances.
He begins, however, by considering what he calls “first chances,” the circumstances that create a character’s initial condition—it could be one’s social status at birth, it could be falling in love. Calling all these “first chances” seems a forced way of relating them to the main theme, and it delays the development of that theme. For example, Greenblatt sees the recovery of the lost family in The Comedy of Errors not as a second chance but as a recovery of the first chance. He relates this to his own experience of returning to his childhood home in his student days and finding that nothing had changed. A second chance would mean something new.
But in this opening section his discussion of the comedies is engaging on its own terms. It shows how little control the characters have: circumstances, coincidence, or just plain muddle count for more than the characters’ wills, as in plays like The Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night they “blunder as if in a fog toward the happy ending that they could never have achieved through their conscious efforts.” The happy ending may be the achievement of love or the restoration of a lost family; the common factor is the characters’ willingness to accept what life happens to offer, however strange it may look. As Olivia in Twelfth Night puts it, “Let it be.”
What destroys the characters of tragedy is their refusal to let it be, their stubborn insistence on their own ideas, their own wills. Here the theme of the book emerges more clearly, as the tragic figures block the possibility of second chances, for themselves and for others. Lear’s love-test is a way of denying the future, fixing his daughters in the one relationship that matters, their relationship to him. In his mind they will never be adults with their own lives. It takes Cordelia to point out that when she has a husband, she will have a life in which she cannot love her father “all.” Her marriage will be a second chance, a different love, and this Lear cannot accept. When in the later scenes he gets something like his dream of an exclusive life with Cordelia—in prison “we two alone will sing like birds i’ th’ cage”—the second chance is a fantasy, and it ends with Cordelia dead. With the reverse psychology of which he is a master, Iago blocks Othello’s chance to restore his faith in Desdemona simply by dangling it as a possibility. The more Iago suggests that he might be wrong, the more Othello insists that he must be right. In the end Othello too blocks the future, putting out the light that he cannot (in Shakespeare’s coinage) “relume.” Othello tries to imagine a future after death, in which he will be punished for what he has done, but as Greenblatt insists, this too is a fantasy; death is final.
His most interesting juxtaposition is of the Henry IV plays with Antony and Cleopatra, in a chapter called “Second Chances and Delinquency.” Hal revolts against his father’s hypocrisy: for all the king’s insistence on the dignity and decorum of royalty, he got the crown by rebellion, and he has on his conscience the murder of Richard II, the rightful king he deposed. Hal seeks a substitute father in the form of Falstaff, whose roguery is so open that when he speaks of himself as an innocent misled by bad company there is no hypocrisy—the joke is too obvious. But Hal’s tavern life, though it may look like a second chance, a fresh start, is nothing of the kind. He uses it to manipulate his own image, to increase the public impact of his apparent reformation when he becomes king, a reformation he intended all along. Seeming to enjoy the tavern life, he is actually using it cynically for his own purposes. Far from rebelling against his father, he is his father’s son, and “this interval,” as Greenblatt writes, “is a piece of cold calculation very much like those on which his royal father prided himself.”
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Antony, on the other hand, is the real thing. His delinquency from his Roman responsibilities is the result not of cool calculation but of an impulse he can’t control. He tries from time to time, but ultimately fails; he might say, with Olivia, “Let it be.” This creates a genuine second chance, a new life with Cleopatra in the service of a desire “irresistible, intense, and transformative.” He has no illusions about Cleopatra, regularly attacking her for what Greenblatt calls “her theatricality, her manipulative tricks, her promiscuity, her fraudulence.”
What he can’t do is stay away from her for long. Hal’s rejection of Falstaff is final and devastating; Antony’s rejections (plural) of Cleopatra are never more than temporary, and in the end he dies in her arms. The exotic, erotically appealing queen and the overweight drunk may seem to be a study in contrasts. What they share is a vitality, “an overwhelming intensity of life” that Hal to his cost rejects and Antony—also to his cost, but the price is worth paying—accepts.
Greenblatt’s fullest discussion is of The Winter’s Tale, in which Leontes, in the grip of a mad jealousy, fantasizing about what his wife, Hermione, is up to with his friend Polixenes, and without even an Iago to blame, shows a stubborn rejection of reality that recalls the tragic heroes, destroying his own life and the lives around him. In the end he gets it all back, with the return from the dead of his wife and the discovery of his lost daughter, Perdita. Well, not quite all: his son, Mamillius, is dead, and stays dead. Exercising due caution and remembering that Shakespeare is working from a source story, Robert Greene’s Pandosto, Greenblatt speculates about the possible relationship between The Winter’s Tale and Shakespeare’s life.
The playwright spent the bulk of his career in London, leaving his wife and family in Stratford. During this period his son, Hamnet, died. But Greenblatt suggests that around the time Shakespeare wrote The Winter’s Tale he “seems to have made up his mind to leave London and return to Stratford.” When Leontes gets his wife and daughter back, Greenblatt asks, is there a hint of Shakespeare’s restored relationship with his wife, Anne, and his daughter Judith? After the death of Hamnet, as with the death of Mamillius, any such restoration would be incomplete. While all this is speculative, the speculation is tantalizing, especially since the resurrection of Hermione is a radical change from the source story. The ending of The Winter’s Tale, Greenblatt suggests, may also be “a wild experiment,” as though Othello was given a second chance, cured like Leontes of his jealousy and reunited after years of penitence with a miraculously surviving Desdemona. We might also think of the ending of King Lear, where Lear desperately tries to imagine that Cordelia is breathing; the first sign that Hermione is living is that her statue breathes. Is The Winter’s Tale, after its grim beginning, Shakespeare’s way of giving tragedy a second chance?
Stephen Greenblatt writes the introduction and the first four chapters of Second Chances; Adam Phillips writes the last three and the conclusion. Turning from Shakespeare to Freud (and not just to Freud, as we’ll see), Phillips takes us into the abstract world of psychoanalytic theory, where we think not of particular children but of “the child.” Though their methods are very different, there are echoes between Phillips’s section of the book and Greenblatt’s. One of the frustrations in Freud’s clinical practice was the number of patients who refused the second chance, who claimed to want to be cured but in reality insisted on staying the same. This recalls Shakespeare’s tragic heroes, who refuse to accept the truths that could save them, clinging instead to their destructive fantasies.
While Greenblatt keeps a tight focus on Shakespeare, Phillips ranges more widely, drawing not just on the psychology of Freud but on that of the English pediatrician and psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott. His most fruitful excursions are into literature: Proust and Kafka. One form of second chance is the recovery of the past through memory. In psychoanalysis this involves strenuous work in the analyst’s office; all Proust’s narrator has to do is eat a madeleine. In Kafka’s fable “Leopards in the Temple” the second chance takes a very different form:
Leopards break into the temple and drink to the dregs what is in the sacrificial pitchers; this is repeated over and over again; finally it can be calculated in advance, and it becomes a part of the ceremony.
Violation takes on a new life as ritual, accepted as normal.
To this Phillips adds the “fort-da” (gone-there) game Freud observed his grandson playing. The child hid an object and declared it was gone, then brought it out of hiding and announced it was there again. In this way he gained control over the experience of loss, turning it into a game that always repeated the second chance. But a game is not reality, and this raises the question of whether a second chance can be more than wishful thinking. Phillips broods over this question, but toward the end of his discussion he seems optimistic: “Second chances are by definition enlivening and benignly transformative. They are associated with a recovery, a restoration, a coming back to life.”
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This sounds like the ending of The Winter’s Tale. But the last line of that play is “Hastily lead away,” as though to snatch away the vision of happiness before it breaks. Here we confront a difference between drama and life: life goes on, but plays end. Can we confirm our confidence in the second chance by looking beyond the ending, to see if they really lived happily ever after? Usually not. We may have seen enough of Beatrice and Benedick, Rosalind and Orlando, to believe they will be fine. But what of the cases in which a man has seriously wronged a woman, as Claudio has wronged Hero in Much Ado About Nothing, Bertram Helena in All’s Well That Ends Well, Posthumus Imogen in Cymbeline? In Much Ado and Cymbeline the final reconciliations, giving the man a second chance, are quick, part of a pattern, and discourage awkward questions. But the ending of All’s Well is hedged about with “if” clauses, and in Bernard Shaw’s mischievous rewriting of the last scene of Cymbeline Imogen dwells on the fact that Posthumus tried to have her murdered; it’s clear that she’s not going to let him forget it. Second Chances is a lively and provocative book, but (appropriately, given its theme) it’s not the last word on the subject, and that is one of its virtues.
Second chances take many forms: family reunions, recovered memories, rituals, games. Can they also take the form of a writer’s survival in the imaginations of his readers? The question is provoked by Marjorie Garber’s Shakespeare in Bloomsbury, whose title almost suggests that the playwright was there in person. While the word “Bloomsbury” suggests a certain set of values—among them honesty, sexual freedom, and the regular consumption of cocoa—the figures who made up the Bloomsbury group had a wide variety of talents and interests, and Shakespeare when he got to Bloomsbury had multiple lives.
In this thorough and thoughtful study Garber casts her net wide, beginning with the Victorian response to Shakespeare as exemplified by Virginia Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephen. Stephen admired Shakespeare’s heroines for typifying a certain Victorian ideal of womanhood: “gentle, pure, and obedient”—and above all subordinate to men. Garber reproduces two photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron in which we see young women gazing up trustingly into the faces of wise old men with luxuriant beards: Juliet and Friar Laurence, Miranda and Prospero. After the death of his second wife, Stephen expected his daughters to spend their lives looking after him. Woolf later confided to her diary that if her father had lived longer, “his life would have entirely ended mine.” No chance for a room of one’s own. On the other hand, Woolf had the run of her father’s library, he encouraged her reading, and his love of poetry, which he declaimed aloud, anticipated Bloomsbury’s sense of the importance of Shakespeare’s language. This was in its own way as Victorian as Stephen’s view of women: Tennyson was buried with his copy of Cymbeline open at a favorite passage, which he had been contemplating just before his death.
Virginia Woolf, the dominant presence in Garber’s book, had her own way of expressing Shakespeare’s importance to her. When her husband, Leonard, “told her that he was the only person who understood her, she replied, ‘You and Shakespeare.’” She wrote of Shakespeare, “I never yet knew how amazing his stretch & speed & word coining power is, until I felt it utterly outpace & outrace my own.” In her novels, characters are judged by their reactions to Shakespeare. In The Voyage Out Mrs. Flushing declares that she hates Shakespeare, her husband admires her for daring to say it, and we know at once that these characters won’t do.
In other novels, crucial phrases from the plays capture a character’s feelings: Othello’s line “If it were now to die,/’Twere now to be most happy” has that function for Clarissa Dalloway. The quotations are not always linked to particular figures: “Scraps and fragments,” from Troilus and Cressida, recurs in a variety of contexts throughout Between the Acts. Shakespeare himself makes what Garber calls an Alfred Hitchcock appearance in Orlando, as a fat, shabby man with “the most amazing eyes.” Finally, the emergence of Shakespeare not as a man of the theater but as a writer to be read leads away from drama and toward the novel, Woolf’s characteristic form.
Other Bloomsbury figures had their own Shakespeares. Woolf did not engage with other critics; academic controversies about Shakespeare left her cold. But the critic and biographer Lytton Strachey took on the conventional view of Shakespeare’s last plays espoused by Edward Dowden and others. Dowden labeled the tragedies “In the Depths” and the last plays “On the Heights,” imagining Shakespeare emerging from a period of personal gloom and despair to a final serenity. In his essay “Shakespeare’s Final Period,” Strachey saw passages of violent rage and, in the late plays as a whole, not serenity but boredom. Shakespeare was “bored with people, bored with real life, bored with drama, bored, in fact, with everything except poetry and poetical dreams.” In opposition to critics like Dowden, Strachey saw Shakespeare as “a sceptic, a cynic” and not just “better so” but “necessarily so.” While for Woolf, Shakespeare was a pervasive presence, for Strachey he was a subject to argue about.
We might not expect an economist to have much to say about Shakespeare, but that is simply a reflection on the economists of our time. John Maynard Keynes was deeply interested in the arts and took a practical interest in Shakespeare. He noted that Shakespeare was well off at the end of his life, with substantial property in Stratford, and he held the view that a condition for great art was economic prosperity; Shakespeare arrived just when England could afford him. When Keynes himself became wealthy, the arts benefited. He helped to fund the building of the Cambridge Arts Theatre, and in 1942 he took over the leadership of the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts, which eventually became the Arts Council of Great Britain. On a more personal note, he married Lydia Lopokova, a Russian ballet star turned actress. Her career as an actress in England was a mixed success, but she played Olivia in Tyrone Guthrie’s production of Twelfth Night, a production Keynes asked Woolf to review. She did so, as tactfully as she could, concluding: “We must read Twelfth Night again.”
For the art critic Roger Fry it was the poetry that mattered, not for its realism but for its lack of it. His preference was for the emblematic, capturing the essence of reality rather than its surface, and he was a great admirer of the abstract stage designs of Edward Gordon Craig. When the historian George Trevelyan praised the “Winter Song” from the ending of Love’s Labour’s Lost for its realistic detail—“Marian’s nose looks red and raw,” “milk comes frozen home in pail”—Fry called such appreciation “trivial.” What mattered to him was “pure poetry…significant form.” Garber links this preference to the “formalism [that] was shaping modern criticism in both literature and the visual arts.”
A combative literary critic, an economist with a love of the arts, an art critic dedicated to formalism—the Bloomsbury response to Shakespeare was varied, to say the least. As Shakespeare in Bloomsbury goes on, more and more figures enter the picture: Desmond MacCarthy, James Strachey, Rupert Brooke, Jacques Raverat, T.S. Eliot, Clive Bell, Duncan Grant. The accounts get shorter and more cursory, the ideas more miscellaneous, and the effect is like that of fragments in the bottom of a box of popcorn. There are still insights and nuggets of information, but in a book about Shakespeare in Bloomsbury how much does it matter to know that Leonard Woolf had a late-life friendship with the actress Peggy Ashcroft or that Eliot split with Bloomsbury when he got religion?
There is, however, one highly significant theme that recurs throughout the discussion, and that is Bloomsbury’s ambivalent attitude to Shakespeare in the theater. Edwardian Shakespeare production was dominated by the elaborate scenic spectacles of Herbert Beerbohm Tree, with heavy cuts and stagey acting. Bloomsbury of course would have none of that. But long after Tree was gone and Shakespeare became more important than the scenery, Virginia Woolf, seeing a production of Romeo and Juliet, complained that the actors spoiled the poetry. Given that the actors included John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier, Edith Evans, and Peggy Ashcroft, the complaint suggests not a local incompetence but a fundamental problem.
The figure who addressed it was George “Dadie” Rylands, a Cambridge don who was also a director and an actor. He reformed the delivery of Shakespeare’s verse, rejecting both “the huff-and-puff of old-style rhetoric” and “the clipped twittering of drawing-room comedy” in favor of a natural delivery that brought out the meaning of the lines, allowing “colloquial emphases and prose order.” On the latter point, he saw the importance of Shakespeare’s prose at a time when Shakespeare was seen primarily as a writer of poetry. Rylands’s impact continued to be felt in the early 1960s, when the Royal Shakespeare Company established its distinctive style. Peter Hall, John Barton, and Trevor Nunn, crucial figures in the development of that company, had been Rylands’s students, and they brought his ideas to bear on their work. Hall put some backs up by declaring that meaning was more important than poetry; but what he meant was that it was more important to convey the purpose of the lines than to make mellifluous noises. That was the influence of Rylands.
The Marlowe Dramatic Society, based in Cambridge, was where Rylands did much of his work, and it pioneered a natural style of performance very different from the style of the professional theater. In particular, there was a new clarity in the language. Strachey commented on “the delight of hearing the blank verse of Shakespeare spoken unaffectedly and with the intonation of civilised English.” He saw more hope for the theater in the university amateurs than in the professionals. E.M. Forster, reviewing Rylands’s production of Hamlet, was impressed with the way the characters thought about what they were saying, and concluded, “We come away from Cambridge feeling that Shakespeare had not only a sense of beauty but a mind.” Woolf, having seen the same production, wrote to Rylands that she was “dumfoundered [sic] at your brilliance as a producer.”
Even so, she preferred Shakespeare read to Shakespeare acted, and however impressed she may have been with Rylands’s Hamlet, she found his Antony and Cleopatra “a dragging weak performance.” Occasional enthusiasms notwithstanding, there was in Bloomsbury a fundamental mistrust of theater. Strachey, though he enjoyed play readings (in one of which he played Cleopatra), declared that Shakespeare’s plays were “a bore when acted.” Roger Fry was more sweeping: “The malign influence of the theatre on drama has been long apparent.”
The reader, according to Woolf, has special privileges: “He can pause; he can ponder; he can compare…. He can read what is directly on the page, or, drawing aside, can read what is not written.” She wrote in her diary: “Shall I read King Lear? Do I want such a strain on the emotions? I think I do.” One senses that for her the private experience of reading King Lear was more emotionally demanding than seeing it on the stage. And private reading can produce a deep response whose effect an outsider can only guess at. After Strachey died Dora Carrington, who had been living with him, spent the next few weeks reading Shakespeare’s sonnets at night. Then she committed suicide.
Finally, the personal element in the Bloomsbury response to Shakespeare makes it quite different from ours. It is untouched by anxieties about gender, race, colonialism—our sense of Shakespeare as a problem to be worried about and possibly censored, adapted, or banned. This goes with the preference for private reading, which leaves public concerns outside in the political arena. In its own way Second Chances also gives us a private Shakespeare. It concerns itself with individual lives, with personal rather than political crises. In particular, Stephen Greenblatt does not engage with other critics; when he wants a reference outside the text he draws on memories from his own life. And when Virginia Woolf retires to read King Lear she wants something personal from it, a strain on the emotions. Our political concerns matter, but if we have anything to learn from Bloomsbury, it is the power of Shakespeare’s language and what it can do not just for us but to us.
