Henry Oliver on Measure for Measure, Late Bloomers, and the Smartest Writers in English
Literary critic Henry Oliver, author of Second Act and writer of The Common Reader, joins Tyler Cowen for a close reading of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure — parsing the play line by line, editions open, over whether Isabella slept with Angelo — before ranging across how to read Shakespeare, what Jane Austen took from Adam Smith, why Swift is the smartest English writer, what actually makes advertising work, and what separates a genuine late bloomer from the resilience-and-grit myth.
Key ideas
- Measure for Measure is a play about pragmatism. Oliver reads it as the sequel to The Merchant of Venice’s problem of mercy: no character can live up to their own stated principles, so an arbitrary law is imposed and everyone muddles through. The forced marriages are not a happy ending but the least-bad one — ‘no one is dead’ — which is, he argues, the only way the play works short of tragedy.
- Close reading is a live skill, and disagreement is diagnosable. The episode’s centre is a genuine textual dispute — Cowen reads ‘I did yield to him’ as a hint that Isabella slept with Angelo; Oliver, reading from the Arden line by line, insists it does not. Where two similar readers diverge, Oliver locates the cause in the text’s deliberate ambivalence, lost context, and temperament — not in one side being wrong.
- Shakespeare wrote to be read, not only performed. He knew anthologists copied his best speeches and that his plays sold in quarto, so he planted ‘anthology speeches’ for a divided audience of penny groundlings and Latin-punning grammar-school men. The best productions (Jonathan Miller’s) just make sure the cast knows what the words mean and get out of the way.
- Advertising works when it joins the hard sell to the image. Oliver’s decade in the trade left him with a clear history: the hard sell (facts, repetition) and image advertising (mood — the Marlboro Man) were wrongly severed by the 1960s ‘Creative Revolution’, which produced memorable short films that sell nothing. David Ogilvy’s real revolution rejoined them; the great writers, Swift above all, were superb advertisers of their own ideas.
- A real late bloomer either suffers a shock or becomes their own interruption. Against the genre’s grit-and-never-give-up story, Oliver argues blooming late is triggered by a sharp external event or by the refusal to die without doing the thing — and that late bloomers enjoy success more, because they leave the bad thing behind for something new.
Content
Measure for Measure as a work of pragmatism
Oliver opens on why the play fell into neglect: it is hard to enjoy staged — an unsatisfying ending, argument delivered too fast to follow, a comedy structure yoked to an unhappy resolution (‘You’re all going to get married, and I’m telling you what to do’). His own reading takes it as the sequel to The Merchant of Venice: where Portia’s mercy ‘droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven’, here mercy is ‘very strained’, a contrivance of human government. Angelo shines like a king only until the real Duke returns and drains his authority away. The deeper claim is that no individual can be consistent with their own principles — Isabella insists ‘we cannot weigh our brother with ourself’ — so the play becomes a work of pragmatism: spouting abstract principles only makes you a hypocrite, and in the end some arbitrary law gets imposed and everyone must make it work.
Three rival readings, and a fertility crisis
Cowen presses three readings. First, that the play is feminist and its title ironic: Isabella’s expectations are violated at every turn — barred from the convent, made to believe her brother executed, then taken by the Duke without consent — so the Christian standard of measure-for-measure hands the women terrible outcomes. Second, that it reworks The Rape of Lucrece: where Lucrece’s rape is real and topples an autocracy, here the body trick and substitutions forestall the crisis and keep the autocracy standing — a worse deal for many, but no one dies. Third, a deliberately non-literal reading of a society so saturated with illegitimate couplings that ‘a form of incest is everywhere’, which is why Isabella recoils into the nunnery. Oliver declines the incest reading and offers his own: a fertility-crisis play. Shut the brothels and the state loses the population it needs to exist; Isabella is being forced toward the sex market, and the convent is her way of keeping her principles — until the Duke tells her that, brothels closed, she must marry and have children because there is no other way out.
Did Isabella yield? A line-by-line dispute
The conversation’s centre is a textual argument conducted with the books open — Cowen on the Folger, Oliver on the Arden. Cowen worries at Isabella’s Act 5 line ‘I did yield to him’, reading the surrounding language (‘how I prayed and kneeled’) as a subtle admission that she actually slept with Angelo and did her part of the trade. Oliver walks the lines and refuses it: ‘prayed’ and ‘kneeled’ mean what they say, the ‘yield’ refers to conceding a premise in their earlier argument, and Cowen’s reading ‘reads too cleanly into the known details of the plot’ — since the arranged substitution of Mariana would have to be a secret shared only between Isabella and the Duke, which cannot work. Cowen concedes it is a non-literal reading; both enjoy the impasse. Oliver rejects the Girardian frame too — the substitutions are pointedly not doubles, Isabella is driven by inner desire rather than mimetic rivalry, making the play ‘anti-Girardian’ — and dismisses the ‘secret Catholic Shakespeare’ thesis for lack of evidence, while granting that Shakespeare always writes about the pre/post-Reformation tension. The Duke and Isabella end up married because they mirror each other — justice and mercy, temperance and passion, both willing to deceive in a good cause, both the least sexualised characters — a bad-looking ending, Oliver says, but not a bad one.
How to read Shakespeare
Cowen holds a ‘strange view’ that the ideal Shakespeare is read silently, any performance a dilution. Oliver agrees more than most: Shakespeare knew he was being read — anthologists came to the playhouse to copy the good speeches, a third to a half of the plays appeared in quarto, and he wrote ‘anthology speeches’ on purpose for a divided audience of penny groundlings and clever grammar-school men who wanted the Latin pun and the legal debate. Modern productions often mislead because directors over-intervene with ‘crazy schemes and metaphors’; the best Measure for Measure Oliver ever saw was student amateurs directed by the opera director Jonathan Miller, whose entire method was to make sure the cast knew what the words meant and then let them get on with it. On screen, the best Shakespeare is often the least Shakespearean (Orson Welles, Chimes at Midnight), with the filmed Globe productions — Mark Rylance and Stephen Fry in Twelfth Night — a standout.
Austen, Smith, Swift, and how fiction changes minds
Turning to Oliver’s wider work, Cowen asks what Jane Austen took from Adam Smith: ‘almost everything.’ Not only the moral content but the narrative technique — whose head the reader is in, what information they are given — all in the service of Smith’s point that we must build our own impartial spectator and develop our own moral judgement. Smith in turn drew on the eighteenth-century novelists (Swift, Richardson), even reusing their examples, and — surprisingly for so liberal a mind — endorsed Richardson as good moral reading. On the mechanism by which fiction changes belief, Oliver deflates the magic: it works the same way as anything else, only if you do the hard Smithian work of absorbing and testing it, which is why moral philosophers’ own morality is so little improved by their subject. Swift he rates the smartest English writer bar Shakespeare, because he handles practical questions — coinage, government, war — in both fiction and non-fiction, either as blunt polemic or as the total ambivalence of Gulliver’s Travels, a book in which he contrives never to state his own view. Reading Swift before working in politics taught Oliver ‘the sociology of politics’ and helped push him out of it.
What makes advertising work
Oliver spent nearly a decade in advertising and tries to keep it from ‘polluting’ his reading of literature — advertising, he says, is not a great art. But taken broadly as ‘the calling of attention to some particular thing of importance’, the great writers were superb advertisers of their own work; Swift’s career could be reframed, only half-obtusely, as unmatched lobbying and PR. We do not really know how well advertising works, partly because targeting is far cruder than people assume — ‘being followed by the same bloody toaster’ is not targeting. Two schools compete: the hard sell (facts, repetition, the product named again and again) and image advertising (a mood — the Marlboro Man, Steinway’s ‘instrument of the immortals’). The 1960s ‘Creative Revolution’ wrongly discarded the hard sell in pursuit of novelty, yielding memorable short films (the Levi’s ad) at the end of which you cannot say what was being sold. David Ogilvy’s real revolution in the 1950s joined the hard sell to the image — which is when advertising still works, and, Oliver notes, what Cowen himself does on his podcast and blog.
Overrated, underrated, and the late-bloomer question
A round of over/underrated runs through the English canon: Paradise Lost and Spenser’s Faerie Queene underrated and unread, Bleak House Oliver’s pick for best novel in English, Galsworthy ‘crushingly dull’; Tolkien underrated by highbrows who dismiss him unread, Harry Potter genuinely good but overrated by the adults who make more of it than children’s books can bear. Wealthy, academia-dominating literary cultures — American and British alike — overrate their own, and it will take a generation to see what lasts. Closing on his own subject, Oliver explains why Second Act struck a chord: people want a serious answer, not the usual resilience-and-grit story, which he argues against even as the topic implicitly sells the dream. Late blooming is triggered either by a sharp external shock — a suicide attempt, a hotel fire — or by ‘becoming your own interruption’, refusing to die without doing the thing; Grandma Moses, who could only paint once retirement gave her the time back, is the external-circumstances type. Late bloomers enjoy success more, he says, because they leave the bad thing behind for something new — ‘the ultimate anti-boredom’.
See also
- Henry Oliver — speaker
- Tyler Cowen — host
- Measure for Measure — the Shakespeare play read line by line in this episode
- Arthur Brooks on Reinvention, Religion, and the Science of Happiness — a companion CWT conversation on reinvention and second acts