From Second Chances: Shakespeare and Freud, a book co-written with Stephen Greenblatt, which will be published next month by Yale University Press.

The idea of the second chance is one of our more familiar self-cures for a certain kind of despair: the despair that comes from seeing ourselves as saboteurs of opportunity, as fundamentally self-destructive, distracted creatures whose hate is far stronger and stranger and more pleasurable than our love. In thinking about second chances, at least to begin with, it may be worth wondering what a life would be like in which there were no such thing, a life in which every act was irredeemable (in which apology would be nonsensical), every transgression unforgiven and unforgivable (in which mercy would be unrealistic), every mistake uncorrectable (in which revision would be impossible), every act and apparent choice determined by forces beyond us. A life in which losses could not be recovered and conflicts could not be resolved. A life without cure or hope or useful repetition. So how, then, would our lives be different—or even better—if we lived as if there were no such thing as a second chance? It is an almost impossible question to answer, but it is something many people have had to do. It would be a life spent adapting to an absolute defeatedness, a life of intractable guilt and irredeemable shame. It could feel like a life of radical self-betrayal.

It is not, of course, incidental that much of the literature we have come to value is, one way or another, about second chances, about what can and cannot be repaired, and about what that repair might be (comedies are always comedies of recovery). The very idea of art as representation, in whatever medium, has within it the promise of a second time around, of a second look or a second medium that can be a second chance. In Shakespeare’s tragedies, what is represented is the so-called tragic hero’s incapacity for self-disillusionment, and so for beneficial change; tragedies are always tragedies about the violence of self-justification, the defending of an intractable position. What we see in tragedy is the worst-case scenario of the need to be right: life as a protracted tantrum.

Tragic heroes suffer from a lack of skepticism about themselves, as though a questioning of the self is an insulting of the self, even a dismantling of it (King Lear and Othello, for example, are furious whenever their actions are contested). They are in despair, one might say, about what their jealousy and their possessive individualism has led them to do; about their capacity for hatred; and about whether anyone can help them. Their demand is for collusion, not for the voicing of alternatives. It is their despair, their helplessness, that has called up in them the faux potency of an irredeemable murderous rage. In this context the idea of the second chance seems, to the hero himself, like an absurd distraction.

The always-tyrannical tragic hero, one can say, enacts his doubt about whether other people really exist, or really exist for him, whether other people have anything to add or anything he may need, other than their willingness to obey him. That is to say, it is the tragic hero’s relationship to help that is being dramatized. And the second chance always depends on the help of others, and so on a confidence in useful and enlivening exchange. The second chance comes out of transforming collusion into collaboration, turning self-sufficiency into a newfound kind of dependence. Not unlike a conversion experience—to which it bears many resemblances—the second chance often requires the dispelling of prior certainties, the revision of what had been taken to be an essential self. Time cannot be literally redeemed or reversed; we cannot go back to the time before the terrible things were done, before we did the terrible things; at the time we meant to do what we did, whatever the consequences may have been. But the question upon which second chances rely is this: What kind of conversations can our ineradicable guilt make possible, or even inspire? Conversations both with ourselves and with others; second chances are made with words.

In the Christian tradition, to be born in a state of original sin might offer someone the second chance of being saved, regardless of whether redemption is assumed to be a gift (of God), an achievement, or within a person’s grasp. Religions are committed to self-improvement and so to the assumption that the individual is in need of such improvement—and capable of it. (Self–improvement is not available, of course, to John Calvin’s already-damned.) In a religious context, it is effectively the second chance that makes the life worth living, the allure of being better, even if the criteria for what it is to be better are always up for grabs. The first chance, the life one is born into, is there for the second chance to be fulfilled.

But in a world without providential design, chances, unanticipated opportunities, tend to be for atheists. To believe that your life is made of, or made out of, chances means not to think of contingency as something like a god. In a more secular context—in which the good life and a person’s potential to live a good life have been radically redescribed (no redemption, no afterlife, no fixed faiths, no destiny or fate)—the first chance rarely feels like a first chance, nor is it described as such. It is only when a second chance seems to offer itself that we can begin to see what our first chances actually were—chances not taken or recognized, or chances not wanted.

The second chance reveals the first chance to have been an opportunity missed, or sabotaged, or simply unacknowledged, and suggests that a life—like a play—is the kind of thing that can be rehearsed. Any sense of continuity in a life—that is to say, any narrative of a life that consists of intelligible episodes, as opposed to random, incoherent change—depends in some way or another on the possibility of the second chance, the repetition of something that can be reworked. People are always older when they get a second chance. The second chance is never the same as the first, partly because it is the product, so to speak, of what we have come to realize was our first chance. If something is experienced as a second chance, it reassures us that repetition is not merely more of the same, or simply mechanistic, or arbitrary and meaningless, for it is only repetition that makes improvisation possible; we can be the authors and not merely the victims, or the actors, of our lives.

We may not always take it for granted that we will get a second chance, and there are many occasions when we will not. But that we may have a second chance makes all the difference in what we do and how we do it. Tragic heroes believe (wrongly) that they have been betrayed by people they love and need, that they have been humiliatingly naïve and inattentive, and that this betrayal is irreparable. They believe above all in their belief; they are adept at radically narrowing their own minds and then remaining spellbound by their own restricted thoughts. A hallmark of madness, the psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott remarked, is the need to be believed. Shakespeare’s tragic heroes believe—need to believe—that in love there can be no second chances. That the only solution to betrayal is revenge, usually murder, which will turn trauma into triumph. That disillusionment with the women they love is terminal, leading only to death or murder. It is assumed that they cannot be, in the best sense, re-illusioned, re-enchanted, and reassured again by these women. What we have learned to call pride, narcissism, or arrogance could be redescribed as simply a determined hatred of the second chance.

Winnicott went on to describe a developmental theory in which to love is to experience and believe in the second chance. In his version of real love, it is always and only a second chance, and so real love—or at least real exchange between people, in his sense of “real”—can only come out of a gradual disillusionment with oneself and the other person; it is the product of a supposed betrayal. The child, says Winnicott, betrays his or her parents (and endangers him- or herself) by hating them, the people the child loves and needs, and thus the child’s ambivalence, the child’s love and hate, are a threat to his or her well-being. The parent betrays the child by becoming a real person to the child, not merely a wished-for person, not a figure of fantasy exclusively meeting the child’s needs. (Parents are inevitably ambivalent about their own children: Oedipus Rex, after all, is also a story about the murderous wishes of parents in relation to their children.) In Winnicott’s story of child development, the inevitability of things going wrong initially between parents and children—and eventually between adults in their various relationships—is taken for granted, with everything depending on how things are repaired and whether they can be repaired. “Reparation” is another word for the second chance.

In these tragedies there is despair about the possibility of repair, of the second chance that is a making of amends—a making up in the fullest sense. For Winnicott love is an endless and ongoing process of illusionment and disillusionment—a falling in and out of love that is the definition of love, of love as something that develops and deepens, a repeated and cumulative (and precarious) cycle of first and second chances that can, at any moment, be sabotaged. For Winnicott, illusionment (falling in love) without the subsequent disillusionment (disappointment) is disengaged and futile and enraged; and the disillusionment that does not lead to a future re-illusionment (a re-enchantment) forecloses development. Shakespeare’s late plays, one could say, are about ways of surviving disillusionment.

In most dramas, and in all psychoanalytic treatments, the story begins with something going wrong. In Shakespearean tragedies, unlike the late romances, repair is preempted and displaced by revenge, revenge—the repetition compulsion at its most extreme and destructive—seeming to be the alternative to, and the refusal of, reparation. The escalation of violence preferred to the understanding of what might have prompted it: revenge always forecloses the possibility of new experience, of discovery. Should we then choose revenge, which is always more of the same, or a second chance, which is not? What is it that can be more alluring, more tempting, more satisfying about revenge—what can abolish second, more conciliatory thoughts? If conflict between people is taken to be unavoidable—taken to be the point, not the problem—as it is in Shakespearean drama and Freudian psychoanalysis, then the question will always be: What, if any, kind of second chance can come out of any given conflict? Or, to put it differently: What is the desire for a life without second chances a desire for?