The annual lecture in memory of Prof. Martin Buber, first president of the Israel Academy, took place on February 21, 2024. It was delivered by Holberg Prize laureate Prof. Stephen Greenblatt of Harvard University, a historian of literature and one of today’s most distinguished Shakespeare scholars.

 

His Pulitzer-prizewinning book The Swerve: How the World Became Modern is a scholarly work that reads as a riveting work of literature. In his dazzling lecture, “Shakespeare’s Second Chance,” Prof. Greenblatt examined the nature of second chances and the possibility of realizing them, in relation to the events of his own life and in the context of Shakespeare’s oeuvre. In Shakespeare’s tragedies, as Greenblatt demonstrated, the protagonists get no second chances, but in “The Winter’s Tale,” a play originally defined as a comedy but more correctly designated as a tragi-comedy, Shakespeare weaves a plot that allows his protagonists a second chance. Such an opportunity, even when it comes to fruition, creates a new reality overhung with question marks, one clearly marked off from the first chances that life had offered the protagonists.