Henry Oliver on Measure for Measure, Late Bloomers, and the Smartest Writers in English

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Conversations with Tyler.com Hello everyone and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today I am chatting in person with Henry Oliver. Henry is a research fellow at Mercatis. He is

author of a wonderful book called Second Act about late bloomers which has been very popular.

He writes a wonderful sub-stack. You can just google to that. Henry Oliver sub-stack and he has a new joint sub-stack with Rebecca Low on the pursuit of liberalism. Henry, welcome. Thank you very much for having me. Now the premise of this episode is we're going to discuss

“Shakespeare's measure for measure but that's not the only thing we'll do but that is what we will”

start with. So measure for measure. Why did that play fall into non-popularity for so long? Because it's very difficult to enjoy on the stage. The ending is unsatisfactory from an entertainment point of view. It's often not so easy to follow the arguments if they're delivered in the rapid clip that Shakespearean acting would rely on and I think you know a lot of people want a happier story than this. Shakespeare was experimenting with a comedy that had an unhappy ending.

You probably can't think of many other comedies like that and there's a reason. Is the ending unhappy? It's not the sort of ending that you would typically want in a comedy or these days in a rom-com or a sitcom or something where the people who want to get married get married in their rebels and nice dresses. It's more like you're all going to get married and I'm telling you what to do and there's a lot of commentary saying, "Well, do any of these people actually

want to be married?" So it's not happy. And you've read this play before and maybe you've seen it on stage in England. What most surprised you when doing this reread? That the scenes between Isabella and Angelo are so enthralling and so passionate and I mean really so much Shakespeare's best work and I had ossified into sort of remembering it as a play of ideas but actually it's it's really really an exciting play, particularly between those two. So let me ask a very general kind

of stupid question but if you had to do the money Python bit where they summarise proofs, I don't want you to summarise the plot but what measure for measure is about in your mind and I'll

“consider some of my takes also but you start. What ultimately is this whole play about?”

I have a moderate length answer to this. That's fine. So I think basically it picks up where the

merchant of Venice leaves off. It takes the problem of mercy. You remember Porsche says the quality of mercy is not strange. Sure. The drop of like the gentle rain from heaven and in this play the quality of mercy is very strained and it does not drop. Like the gentle rain it is a contravence of human, government and it's the question is can we actually have mercy? So there's a wonderful bid at the end of the merchant of Venice when Porsche and the risks are come back to Belmont

and Porsche has those famous lines that like we see as burning in my hall how far that little candle throws his beams so shines a good deed in a naughty world. Measure for measure is the naughty world and the risks are says to Porsche when the moon shown we did not see the candle and she replies so doff the greater glory dim the less. A substitute shines brightly as a king unto the king be by and then his state empties itself as doff an inland broke into the main of waters.

Well that basically is the plot isn't it? Angela shines like a king until the real Duke comes back and then his authority is immediately drained away. We see him for what he really is and those lines are echoed at the beginning when the Duke says that our virtues go forwards from a slight light and if they didn't there would be no point in having them and so the way I read it is Porsche has been a great hypocrite in the merchant of Venice she tells Shilong to show

they all have problems being consistent with their principles. Merchant is saying the Christian state can't really be consistent with its own ideas measure for measure is saying no individual can be consistent with their own ideas and Isabella makes a point of that again and again we cannot

“weigh our brother with our self and the whole I think point of the players to say you must weigh”

yourself in the balance and that's a very difficult thing to do and it's not going to work very well and there'll be some arbitrary law imposed on you at the end but spouting off these abstract principles that where does that get you you're going to be a hypocrite you're going to have these inconsistencies we're just going to have to make it work so I see it as a sort of great work of

pragmatism in that sense. I have several takes let me start with the first literal one.

I think this is quite a a feminist play I hesitate to use that now much overused word but the title is ironic so I measure from measure that's a reference of course to a Christ's sermon on the mound so everyone gets something back from what they gave but the final deal is just terrible for Isabella whose expectations are violated in every way she can't join the comment toward the end of the play she has to confront the ruler of her society which must be very stressful

thing to do for a while she thinks her brother is is being her husband executed that must be a horrible feeling to have and then at the end the Duke is taking her as his own without any a fair consent. Yeah likely that's a form of rape or even worse enslavement whatever she's not having a lot of property rights in this relationship so she gets a terrible outcome in all regards and if you look at Angelo he doesn't get what he wants so he has to marry Mariana whom he

views as a trumpet he had a fling with her five years ago you could say in some very loose manner he's being raped he doesn't want to marry her but it's not that that terrible for him compared to what Isabella has to go through and just that difference that when you dull out justice according to this Christian standard you can do so literally and the women just get these terrible outcomes and I think that's one way to read the play that it's yeah if not anti-Christian highly skeptical

about Christianity I think it's skeptical about the ability of a secular authority to actually impose

“these rules in a world where men have many masters of vice right and we must remember that on”

the south bank of the river where the playhouse was the main institutions were pubs, brothels and bishop's residences and I think that's reflected in the inability of the law to work in this play right Shakespeare says well we're all living in the we're all living in a London where these laws cannot be implemented at all we all know it's wrong and he's trying to bring that to the form

let me give you my second reading which is somewhat less literal so you're contrasting it with

merchant to Venice I thought immediately of the rape of Lucreus which is I think from 1594 so in that story there's an actual rape of Lucreus by Tarkin and she kills herself so there's no substitution there's no body trick the terrible thing simply happens she wants it to be a public you could argue she's killing herself so her body is perated you know through through the public so everyone knows what happens and then at the end the

autocracy falls and part because it's seen as evil because he raped her and she killed herself so that's one way in which the tensions between the political and the erotic can be resolved

and that was you could call it Shakespeare's first scenario what happens in measure for measure is

different kinds of rape are imminent they're avoided through the body trick and through substitutions and through various deceits you may end up with some rape at the end but at least the initial crisis is forestalled and the autocracy stays in power and he's asking the question is that a better scenario is that a plausible scenario can we through artificial actually reconcile the erotic

“and the political it's a terrible deal for many people but maybe that's why we've got because”

the rape of Lucreus is not a wonderful story either this is why I think it's a work of pragmatism because Shakespeare's saying look either we sort of force everyone to get married or they all end up worse off you know in this scenario no one is dead it wouldn't just be if Isabella had had to submit to Angela she would probably have killed herself but several other people would have died as well right the alternative ending here is not more happy marriages but

the play is actually a tragedy so I do agree with what you're saying but I think Shakespeare is ideal logically pragmatic in a way and he's saying this is just this is just the only way things

when she submits is that a happy thing because she's found found the only other person in the

“world who's actually like her and so she's happy to enter into a sort of mutuality with them”

or she's just been broken by the patriarchy and she will in fact suffer in this marriage it's it's an open debate in that play it's not for me really an open debate when Isabella kneels down and pleads at the end she's just been broken and Shakespeare's saying there is no other way to make that work unless people die you can say it all's well that ends well for your point of you also where there's a coupling based on a trick and deceit and body substitution and you can

debate how happy the ending is but it's not obvious Shakespeare sees a better possibility in that play Bertram is much more obviously deserving of what he gets at the end it's an interesting it's a sort of twin it's written about the same time as measure from measure as you say the plots are very similar but in that play although the marriage is imposed upon Bertram and he doesn't want it he then behaves so badly that even those critics like Samuel Johnson who just

find the play you know sort of too much and they don't like it they say I'll just never

reconcile myself to Bertram he's so bad and there's a sense in which there is actually a bit more justice at the end of that play and they may maybe they could become happy I don't think Shakespeare leaves us with that at the end of measure for measure now let me give you my third and least literal reading which I'm not convinced was ever in the mind of Shakespeare not necessarily his intent but it's the one I like best and it's what makes the play for me genius that we're in the society

where the norm is there's much more prostitution than what we're used to and also a lot of affairs so basterdian cuckoldry they're almost everywhere and throughout the play there's so many references to brother and sister when people are not in fact literal brothers and sisters but you're led to

under are they may be half brothers half sisters because we're in the strange world where just people

are going crazy with illegitimate births and couplings and it's really about if there's that much sex and procreation in a society is not a form of incest everywhere and how do people negotiate this in their lives and in politics since incest is one of the greatest sins and when Isabella so refuses to sleep with Claudio which is often seen as an implausible decision by some critics that she won't even consider it that she is the most aware character in the story she

knows the society she is based in has in a sense incest everywhere and she just she may not think Claudio is literally her half brother but she can't stand the notion that she's being asked to do this and once already wanted to retreat from it all together into the confident she does actually make a comparison to incest absolutely well I read it Isabella more sympathetic than those critics and there I mean there are a lot of other critics as well who take hell in her in all's well

that ends well in a similarly they're sort of appalled the idea that this woman would force a man into marriage and so they just can't come to terms with her right and equally a lot of people I think are appalled with Isabella going into the confident I don't read it I don't think I can go along with this incest argument I know what you mean for me it's more of a fertility crisis play

“there is a genuine question I think luchio voices it most loudly but there's a genuine question”

among them all that if we shut down the brothels what will happen to the birth rate it's not obvious that that will work out well doesn't luchio even say or I'll be living in the best house on the main street for a you know for a penny because the market will collapse and there's a lot of other coin age imagery and the idea the relationship between the the idea of stamping a coin as a metaphor for procreation and the importance of demographics to

sustaining the economy is I think quite well established so I read it more in the sense of Isabella feels like she's being forced into the sex market whether through marriage whether through blackmail or whatever because of this kind of the the state must have people the state must have a population to exist going to the nunnery is her way of maintaining her principles and avoiding that and at the end the juke says well sorry but if we're shutting down the brothels and

being good you are going to have to get married and have babies because we don't have another way

“out of the fertility crisis and what we make of her I think is central to how we read measure”

for measure no matter where we end up so there's a passage early on where she notes she's entering the nunnery because she desires more of a strength yes and then someone mentions are you in fact a virgin is the reference and he's not saying she isn't but if all this sex and couplings are going on we have to wonder how virtuous is she actually and is she in part protecting against her own tendencies to go crazy and then in act five scene one there's even a mention where she says I'm not sure

sentence to angelo to angelo sorry you know it's a lone sentence it pops up it goes away

it's as if you're not supposed to notice it and what what really ever happened and when she goes initially to angelo and talks about how virtuous she is and the intrigues are making you and they're the strongest of all possible intrigues they're based on prayer but the wording is so carefully done and so brilliantly ironic at least as a contemporary reader you cannot help but wonder if this is her indirect super subtle way of offering him sex I knew you weren't gonna agree with this

point absolutely not my reading of act one scene four when she goes into the nunnery when she says and have you nuns no further privileges the nuns says are not these large enough she says yes truly

“I speak not as desiring more but rather wishing a more strict restraint I think she's saying well”

are you really strict enough to be nuns this nunnery doesn't seem very non-ish right and luchio then says hail virgin if you be which is him saying I'll believe there's a virgin in this nunnery when I see it kind of thing and I think the criticism is not at her but at the institution

and this is consistent with the rest of the play the individual always stands out against the

institution against the abstract argument against some high ideal of justice that can't be implemented and I see as a bell a much more as trapped in a kind of Kafkaesque reality where she in fact is good and everyone else is the problem well if we go to act five scene one line one 20 what do you make of Isabella's line quote and I did yield to him and this confuses me I'm not convinced she means it literally but what could be a more literal admission than that

and from the context it's clear that she means angelow again massive confusion on my part confusion is how one learns things right no you can see what I'm worried about right well let's go through it

“let's go through it because I think I think sometimes with Shakespeare have to take it line by line”

high degree she says I went to this penicious kative deputy and the Duke takes issue with her phrasing and she says well the phrasing is everything isn't it the phrasing is what we're talking

about and to me this is the first sign of Shakespeare's pragmatism okay we'll keep unstitching each other's

words in this play and that's even what William James actually says pragmatism is right so there's this constant thing of I'm trying to tell you he's wicked and you won't hear me so part of the context for these lines is that she's she has to say it in a way that you will accept and then he says okay give me the matter in brief to set the needless process by how I persuaded how I prayed and yield how he refilled me and how I replied if I can to center up that already sounding a bit like

she had sex with him but what she's doing there is respeaking Claudio's lines from the earlier in the play when he says she has a prone and speechless dialect in her youth that is the you know this was what will tempt Angela and there's a huge amount of confusion about what that means sure does it mean that she will speak in a way that will be persuasive or does it mean that without her knowing without her having any awareness of it her her presence will sort of inflame

Angelo into taking her side and this I think I did I think you'd be interested in this as an economist Tyler this goes back to all the coinage imagery sure is it the is it the metal or is it the face stamped on the metal that gives it the value which is a metaphor used in the play itself right I think it's a double meaning and we're supposed to wonder if she is not in fact a highly effective seducer we're supposed to wonder but Shakespeare is giving her the opportunity to

rephrase it all I mean I don't think Shakespeare at this point is using prayed and kneeled to mean anything other than what is literally being said I think she is an image of virtue this is what the duke said if you can't take your virtue forth like a light there's no point having it

“that's what she's done the whole play the vial conclusion I now begin with grief and shame to utter”

he would not but by gift of my chased body to his concupiscable in temperate last release my brother and after much debate meant my sisterly remorse confutes my non-anided yield to him that is a reference to the argument that they were having when he backed her into a corner and she had to admit that there was an inconsistency in her position I think that's act two seen two and she had to yield the premise of his argument I don't think there's any sense in which Shakespeare has done

anything other than leaders to believe that you know what follows though is the word but but the next morning but he sends a warrant for my poor brother said so she's implying she did her part of the trade again I admitted it's not clear but she and the duke arranged that she would do that in order to then substitute Marianna for your reading to work these lines would have to mean everyone thinks it was Marianna including you who's going to use that as leverage to get

Angela married but we both secretly know and won't tell anyone else that it wasn't married I mean

known details of the plot for me to go along with that well I told you it was an unliteral reading

indeed indeed how does this relate to James the first well this is put on for his court right

this is we know it was performed for him at court we know it wasn't otherwise hugely popular because there was no quarter so it was perhaps written with him in mind more than in other other ways the idea of measuring yourself that I mentioned earlier that's quite a common idea in Shakespeare's England there's a morality play for example where mercy says measure yourself ever be where of excess and obviously the Puritans love to measure themselves but self judgment can't be the basis

of public policy and then we have this king now who's very interested in these ideas of justice and law and there was a sermon delivered when James became king and as a section in the sermon about the duties of a of a prince who represents god and one of them is the execution of just judgment

“by which all must be measured and so I think Shakespeare is taking up a theme that is current at”

court and which we know James is interested in how to deal with religious tension how to deal with sexual behavior a south of the river and I think he's basically saying you know at the end of the day the king is going to come in and impose the law and that's just how it should be that's a plausible reading which the king could take away from it during a performance right there's a line in measure for measure that suggests the Duke maybe is not inclined toward women which is possibly

a reference to James who had an affair with the Duke of Buckingham in addition to possible other affairs with men maybe maybe but the notion of the Duke not wanting to appear in public James some people suggest did not much enjoy appearing in public that's quite disputed now it's disputed but what James wrote about an ideal ruler some of the Duke's views there are some loose parallels between the two certainly what certainly James's ideas of justice and

government are not unfamiliar to this play and I would not be surprised if this play was at least in a sort of you know the way you watch it and interpret it in in quick succession was at somewhat flattering

“to James yes these other things I think there's often a lot of attempt to say you know to link”

Shakespeare's work to current events of his day and it's always a bit well it's sort of this and

it's sort of similar and you know it can't be sustained can it Shakespeare's cleverer than that but this is being shown at the court of James James might have been there I'm not sure if we know in 1604 and if you're Shakespeare no matter what you intended you're a smart fellow right and James is sitting there possibly listening yeah and even if you intended no connection James would have to be an idiot not to think there might be a connection so you can't escape the

thought oh you're making with the connection whether you initially intended it or not the personal idea is about is this of reference to James's secret homosexuality or whatever that's too speculative for me but why have the Duke not be inclined toward women at least according to one speculation in the play no yeah it's it's said it's said more than once there's no other reason to put it in I think there is I think that he and Isabella clearly mirrors of each other

he's justice and she's mercy he's temperance and she's passion they both it turns out are happy to be deceitful in the cause of justice they hate lying and they hate wrongdoing but they're happy to do it in a good course so they share a kind of pragmatism and they get married because in a funny way they're the least sexualized characters I think it's all done to make them appear and in a funny way like not a badly matched pair if you're going to if you had to force

Isabella to marry someone in this play he would be the dude would be the dude and at least she gets to be wife of the Duke which on personal side may not be wonderful but in let the standard

“of living side is what go well as she's going to do that's what I mean like going into a corrupt”

nunnery submitting to angelo possibly dying or marrying the Duke she's come the chicks being saying this is the best we can hope for for her but that may be not what we want and we may sort of rail against it but that's not a bad ending it looks like an unhappy ending but it's not a bad ending now at some time suggested that measure for measure is a play the chose Shakespeare actually was a Catholic or he wrote it with Catholic themes in mind what's your view on that no

explain us no I agree with now answer it give me your view I don't think we have the evidence for it I think it's it's it's it's not good enough to go around talking about fries and pre-reformation

there's and setting it in particular country or whatever obviously Shakespeare is always writing

about the reformation and he's always writing about the tension between pre-imposed reformation culture not not the least in in terms of that you know there's now an official policy but everyone

and they you know their mothers did things differently and there's a there's a cultural problem there

he's always writing about that hamlets about that right that is not a basis for saying all

“Shakespeare's a secret Catholic and this play is really trying to be publish or whatever I mean”

to me that's a bit like you know using numerical analysis in the Bible to start saying we know when the day of judgment's coming I mean it just doesn't it doesn't hold water I read it as slightly anti-catholic and that is a major theme but Shakespeare's saying here's Vienna they are fryers they have none they have whatever it doesn't avoid any of these problems the problems there maybe a bit worse those systems are corrupt also it's it's a totally

normal thing in English literature to point up the abuses and the corruption of Catholic institutions and you know as is a belligerent to the nunnery right so I I don't buy the Catholic thing at all the whole effort to tell us that Shakespeare was Catholic I don't buy partly because I just don't think you're ever going to get the necessary evidence is this as you're already in play I didn't actually go and look at what Girard said and it's a long time since I read him

there's a lot of substitution right end doubles well isn't the whole point of the substitution that they're not doubles no one actually is substituted properly there is no that can be Girardy and two can it yes again I just I feel like the Girardian analysis is

stretched and stretched like bread dough and it never quite snaps but it's been stretched so far

at this point measure for measure is not like mid-summer night stream mid-summer night stream is a perfectly Girardian play and he has a very very clean analysis and he points out that the lovers had switched their allegiances before the play begins and we're told that in the text right and then in trial is in crusade he has a very good reading of that which is contemporaneous with this play crusades as I won't sleep with you because you know at that point you'll lose all

“interest in me and that's what happens trial is never wants to go to war until he's slept with”

crusade and then he gets up and says right but I go and tell the boys about this and it's only when he realizes that the Greeks are going to try and take crusades for their own that he

becomes interested in her again perfectly Girardian but in this play I think everyone is strongly

motivated by their own inner desires I think of this almost as anti Girardian is a bellar is not mimetic in any way she has to be made to kneel at the end and it's only because she is adhering to her own inner consistency the Angelo can talk around into those difficult positions the whole point of the substitutions is to show us you can't measure your brother against yourself it doesn't the substitutions have to be obviously fake to work do you have a favorite liner too from this

play I did I should have be able to quit it off top of my head I love the bit when is a bellar says to him but man proud man dressed in a little brief authority hardly knowing what he does can can do such things as make the angels weep and periodically those lines become very relevant again one of my favorites not that poetic but when Angelo simply says we must not make a scarecrow of the law and then when the Duke says the baby beats the nurse and quite a thwart

goes all decorum yeah there's a great lines and there's work really well in performance they're very dramatic moments and also with the Duke as rire when he says for they've dust fear the soft intender fork of the poor worm of course talking about death that's right that's right Shakespeare's often had his peak when talking about death talking about death but also being slightly surreal we don't think of him as surreal but some of those lines you've quoted that they're slightly

absurd it's a bit like in the merchant of Venice when Shylock famously says had that ring of Leo and I was a bachelor I would not have traded it for a wilderness of monkeys or in the taming of the shrew one of the maids is described as having gone down the garden to get some parsley as a maid and comeback as a married woman and she was getting the parsley to stuff a rabbit and the whole image is just sort of slightly absurd of this woman getting married while

she's stuffing a rabbit full of parsley but Shakespeare somehow is very good at that kind of thing now I hold the strange view that the ideal version of a Shakespeare play is to read it to yourself not even allowed but silently and that any theatrical performance is a kind of dilution or

“corruption it seems unlikely that's what Shakespeare would have thought but what's your take?”

I don't entirely agree but I agree a lot more than some other people might Shakespeare did write to be read the idea that he wrote to be performed is only part of the truth for one thing he knew that there were anthologies being made and he knew that people came to the playhouse and copied down the good bits to pirate them in the anthologies so he was well aware that he was being read and he was writing those those bits were in the play when you think oh

this character suddenly giving an anthology speech well yes they are because Shakespeare knew that he needed one he also knew he knew that his books would be printed and sold not he didn't know

plays came out in quarter so he wants to be read right and he has a very very divided audience

on the one hand they're paying a penny in the pit and on the other hand there's a kind of elite overproduction from grammar schools and there are all these clever young men who want the pun in Latin they want these these things they can pick up on and boast about the the guys at the ends of court will come and see this play and they'll they'll debate the law elements long into the night so he knows that he's got that audience and that audience

persists today it is true that a lot of modern productions are just terrible and we'll kind of

“give you a bad idea of Shakespeare and the directors I think are two interventionist they come”

up with these crazy schemes and metaphors and it just it distracts the one good production of

this I've seen was done by amateurs students at Rader in London and it was directed by Jonathan

Miller the famous opera director and I said to one of them afterwards this was really good I didn't mean to be rude saying like how were you guys this good but it was really good what did Jonathan Miller do and they said oh he came in and he just said no no we we shant bother with anything else I'll just make sure you know what the words mean and then you can get on with it and I actually think that's that can be a great performance right Hamlet's often done like that just a dark stage

and everyone's saying the words properly and then it's very dramatic but in general I agree with you that reading is better than watching is there a good movie treatment of measure from measure not that I'm aware of but I haven't yet seen the BBC version from the 80s they are often

“quite good and I believe Helen Mirren is in that version of measure from measure and she might make”

I can see that she would make a great Isabella what do you think is the best movie treatment of any Shakespeare play probably the ones that are least Shakespeareian like awesome wells and things like that that would be my pick times at midnight but I had to pick one of those wells but all of the wells yeah stuff like that some of the BBC ones from the 80s are pretty good there's a new Henry IV the whole sequence of four plays was done on the BBC a few years ago

with Tom Hiddleston I thought that was pretty good but I don't I don't watch a lot of them because

I don't always like them I do like it when they film it at the globe and you can watch those online

some of those are excellent particularly mark violence and Steven Fry in 12th night that's a very very good production to get to some of the rest of your work what did Jane Austen take from Adam Smith almost everything Jane Austen is interested in the question of how to be good in a commercial society and she is clearly drawing on Smith's ideas not just for the moral content of her work but for the way she uses narrative techniques and the how she positions the camera

as it were who's head a we in one information that we being given is all done in the service of showing us that we have to create our own impartial spectator inside ourselves and we have to

“be the ones who develop our own sense of moral judgment and I think that's that's a very”

very Smithy and I do what did Jane Austen take from Shakespeare well Jane Austen love going to see Shakespeare but I think she probably loved going to see Mrs. Sidden's and things like that and she had a great sense of the dramatic and the theatrical which is why Mansfield Park works so well in those scenes she's clearly red Shakespeare and she's clearly absorbed a lot of his language but in a funny way she's one of the least Shakespearean of the English novelists and I think that's

much to her credit because she is so distinguished there's very much her own writer and her own sort of thinker is the Scottish Enlightenment or Smith taking much from Shakespeare Smith is clearly taking a lot from the novelists of the 18th century he loves Gull of his travels he loves Samuel Richardson there's no longer a current academic but an academic called Shannon Chamberlain who did a wonderful thesis on a lot of the details of those novels that end up in Smith's work and he ends

up using these same examples as the novelists do to inform how he talks about it so what's coming from Gull of his travels say a lot of the objects that Gull of his have in his pockets the watches and things you know Smith talks about the triviality of these of these objects but also their use and benefit I think he's clearly interested in that he surprisingly for a such a liberal minded person he endorses Richardson and says Richardson is the good novelist to read to learn morals

it may be the most surprising thing he says in a moral and literary context I don't know how much he took directly from Shakespeare now it to me he seems more interested in some of the later writers by what mechanism does reading fiction change beliefs well by the same mechanism that reading anything else changes beliefs we sometimes talk about fiction as if it has a kind of magical quality oh it will give you empathy it will make you a nice person it will do all the

will show you how the people think but of course you can get that in nonfiction or in conversational in a movie or TV or something but if you're not doing the hard work of actually absorbing that thinking about what it means testing your opinions against it in the Smithian sense it will just

way and that we should talk about it in a more Smithian way but that the basic conclusion of that is to say well it's really really hard and it won't work a lot of the time and it takes a lot of reading and a lot of work in the same way that we know that you know most moral philosophers they've done all this moral philosophy and they've published great work it doesn't seem it doesn't seem

“to have changed their personal morality very much right I think something similar is at work”

in fiction so you've read goal of his travels many times you've studied it how did it change your views and on what I found it very useful to have read that book before I worked in politics and I was often startled I was a I was a very low level bad carrier sort of person so I would

occasionally over here interesting things but I was never doing anything interesting but I was often

startled by how much Swift understood about the day to day life of politics the way people interact because what you might call the sociology of politics and the most helpful thing it did was it was one of the many factors that made me think I shouldn't be working there anymore why do you think Swift is the smartest of all English language writers Shakespeare possibly accepted well Swift is Swift has a very different sort of intelligence to Shakespeare and I think he can deal with a

practical question you know to do with coinage to do with government to do with a composition of politics to do with the conduct of a war or something in both a fictional and a non-fiction or manner and he can make those arguments either with the kind of directness

and polemysism that we associate with his pamphlets or with the incredible ambivalence of

Gulliver's travels a book in which he manages not to express his own opinions Shakespeare didn't

“as far as we know do any of the non-fiction arguing so so Swift I think has the has the balance”

there noting that Shakespeare far exceeds him on the on the fictional side even though Gulliver's travels must be one of the very few great books ever written in English and if someone wants to read some Swift in addition to Gulliver's travels where it should they go and why I would get a small selection of the poetry because you'll see just how vicious and sharp and wicked he can be and how much he enjoys burating prostitutes and you see a little bit of the double edgeedness

of what he's doing and then I would maybe read the general to Stella because it's very lively and very very good observation and it's I love that book and then you know the normal pamphlets that people read everyone's going to tell you to read the one about eating the babies but there's a lot of other good pamphlets, trapeze letters some of the best work he ever did right yes now in two readers disagree about what a novel means or how good it is you mean you could take

the two of us our world views are not diametrically opposed right as people go in the broader universe what's your theory of what accounts for that difference and you can reference me specifically just to give this some bite so we disagree about something in Swift or Shakespeare or Jane Austen what's likely at the root of that disagreement well one thing is that fiction is intentionally ambivalent by which I mean Swift in Gulliver's travels does not want to express his own opinions

he wants to set out a kind of polyphonic set of different views and you can take a few natural readings from it but he also is giving you room to get it wrong and he's doing that on purpose

and most of the novelists are doing that most of the time the second thing is that we lose context

for these books so quickly and we very often are reading them so far out of their context that we can't help but bring ourselves to it and the third thing Tyler is that some readers want to find more controversial readings than others and I suspect you might be like that I am like that I think a lot of the differences in readings come from temperament yeah that one is born with essentially oh well born with developed but 60% you're born with it yeah yeah I'll go with it

“be my guess and I think temperament is important because that's what informs the creation of the book”

originally right yeah and Austen's temperament is clearly fundamentally different to Swift's even though they might agree on certain issues and so we're reacting to her temperament we're not just granting to her content now before doing your current work you are an advertising for almost a decade mm-hmm how do you feel that work in advertising has shaped how you read literature I try to keep them very separate I try to tell you that I'm sure you fail

pollute my readings of literature why is it a pollution because advertising is not a great art and to apply the principles of advertising to literature would be a diminishment but you don't have to apply the principles advertising gives you insight into what people value how people respond yeah and that's also a part of literature it is and if you take advertising not to mean headlines and banner ads and things like that but to mean

calling of attention to some particular thing of importance you can see that a lot of the great

is very very good at advertising um you can if you wanted to be obtuse you could reframe

his whole career as an exercise in lobbying and PR and realize that no one's ever been as good as he was right so your favorite authors are the ones who are best at advertising is what you're now telling us I have a very Catholic view of literature and I admire those writers who are practical and can do a lot of different things so I love Samuel Johnson and one reason is that he can

“write a sermon a legal opinion an advert almost anything you want and I think the literary talent”

can often be turned to those multiple uses why isn't there more creativity and advertising so much of it to me seems stupid in boring yes you would think well if they had a clever idea that people would talk about it would be better but that doesn't happen is that a market failure or it's

actually more or less optimal I don't think it's optimal I think advertising we don't know how

well advertising works and we're still impeded in that because of the laws about who you can and cannot target on the internet so I think most people would actually be surprised if they went into an advertising agency to learn just how poorly we can target people right everyone thinks they're being targeted all the time but being followed by a toaster advert is really quite basic and everyone everyone uses the same toaster example because everyone's being followed by the same bloody toaster

that's not targeting I think they've been taken over by bad ideas there are sort of two competing schools of advertising one of them is the hard sell where you put a lot of information and facts and you name the product a lot by this aspirin it kills headaches three times quicker than other brands we did a study 38% of the internet right and you just hammer it all the time the other advertising school is the sort of image based right so after Rubik camera there's

wonderful Steinway adverts the instrument of the immortals have you brought great music into your home the woman in the dress at the piano it you're sort of buying a whole mood right or a vibe the the peak of that is like the tiger on the frosty cereal packet you don't need words or the mom broman you buy these cigarettes you're gonna look like that cowboy in that shirt and you're gonna smoke and you're gonna feel like a man and it's just gonna be like great right cause light

does that now then there was this terrible terrible thing called the creative revolution in the 1960s where supposedly is like the modernism of advertising and I mean I like modernism too but it made some terrible mistakes but and what they did was they said we're gonna get rid of all this hard sell stuff it's boring the adverts you know no one wants to look at them and we're going to be new all the time we're going to be unexpected all the time and everyone can point to a hand full

of adverts like think small where they instead of selling you a big car they got bigger every year with lots of features they sell you a little beetle it's counter intuitive and it's clever and it's funny but really the beetle would have sold itself and some of the people who wrote those adverts actually say that in their memos why we're writing these admenus car sell itself and it led to this kind of this kind of advertising that was very prevalent when I was growing up

“in the 90s and the 80s remember that Levi's advert it's setting like the 50s maybe and he goes”

to buy a condom in a tin and the grumpy old man behind the desk looks very disapproving and then he goes to like get his girlfriend and she's the minister's daughter and they run off together on a train this was in America I can't remember where sounds very I think it's English really to me but then and then so that's like it's like a little short film and it's this story about rebellion and whatever and then at the end it says you know Levi's and obviously they show you the pocket

of the jeans in the end maybe that's a good ad I don't necessarily think so but it's indicative of the way things have gone that in pursuit of that mood or that vibe you just get this kind of short entertainment and at the end you're like I I don't know what I was being advertised I don't know what product it was no one no one showed me anything useful the real creative revolution happened in the 50s under David Ogre and he joined the hard sell with the image and that's when

advertising still works those are the adverts you remember those are the adverts that make you want to buy things right you're actually quite good advertising you do it on your podcast you do it on your blog and you do a little bit of the hard sell a little bit of the image and I think I think everyone

“knows that that's what works but they want to be cool they want to do the creative revolution and”

you know we just get these adverts that suck are you up for a round of overrated versus underrated

always here's some easy ones John Milton's paradise last overrated or underrated underrated why

oh it's easily it's easily one of the best poems in English and it's not red enough but see Emil Johnson said no man you know ever wished it was longer do you agree I do happen to agree with that particular statement but Johnson's allowed to be wrong a couple of times and that's one of his clunkers Spencer is very queen seriously underrated you know that's the me as a top 10 work of all times basically no one reads it of course because it's very very long but they don't

if you just read the bits of Spencer that are in the Oxford Book of English verse you will feel the great power of his writing the great magic of what he can do and you will want a little bit more of it like yeah so now we're advertising for Edmund Spencer that's right that's right Carl Swerthi for Scythe Chronicles the book oh overrated they're even worse than you think they're

“so boring absolutely crushingly dull I think they're good melodrama oh Tyler they were made in”

to a tv series which is a kind of downgrade but it tells you something about them that they can be made into a tv series that many people fall yeah oh my god I didn't think they were great literature

but I thought they were quite good and I I never regretted reading them I was I was so bored I couldn't

finish the short stories are truly phenomenal really wild strange compelling I mean I thought I didn't like Lawrence and I went back and read the short tales and I was completely consumed by them Dickens is bleak house I will say underrated in the sense that I know a lot of literary bookish well read people who haven't yet read it I think it's one of the top works I think it's the best novel in English I mean it's really just extraordinary piece of writing I think that with Spencer

are the two most underrated great works yeah I had to say go with that yeah talking and I mean lord of the ring yeah no sure sure sure a lot of the rings plus the hobbit right yeah I will say properly rated by the fans and underrated by you know the eyebrows who dismiss it or the ones who

haven't read it which is look some of them who dismiss it have not read it and that is that is

a known thing or secretly known thing but it's it's clearly one of the great novels of the 20th century Harry Potter I'm going to have to say appropriately rated I can't get through them I feel it's my fault I'm not down I'm them but they just don't interest me somehow but why should they they're not written for adults there are other things and children slators sure that I find easier yes yes not all but a lot of adults quite like them also right they're overrating it

the general idea that these are really really good children's books and they should be read for fun and it's all very exciting that's great I'm used to buy them on the day they came out I was I was young when they came out and just you know read straight through them and then

never think about them again but sort of say these were really good that's that's to me the right

rating dressing up and going to Kings Cross Station without any children I find to be an an active overrating the books but they are really really good and this Harold Bloom thing about all their full of cliches and it's deadening young minds and stuff I that's just rubbish what is there an American fiction that you think is quite underrated and would like to give an advert for I have not read enough American fiction and I'm trying to read more I just read

“democracy by Henry Adams that I actually thought was really good agree and I I think a lot of”

people in Washington would would find it instructive and amusing to read that novel and it's quite short overrated in American fiction presumably underrated no I'm saying what do you find overrides in American fiction a lot of the 20th century stuff that I've tried to read I have not got very far with and I don't know whether that's because my temperament is is wrong or whether they're overrated but I'm suspicious of some of these big white male writers that people want to revive at

the moment I think if you're a wealthy country with a lot of people and you dominate academia many of your writers will end up overrated yeah yeah and yet the country has the New York Times right numerous other outlets it's going to take another generation to properly shake out what's going to last from that period I think but do you think it's also true that many British writers are overrated because your country punches above its weight well it has the TLS it has the London review

it has many of the best bookshops in the world a highly literate population who of your writers ends up overrated because of that are you thinking of like the bomb repims for instance yeah

“I actually I quite like bomb repim and I one thing that's surprising is that I think it's”

Persephone books the the lady who runs that who was republished many many many interesting 20 essentially women writers they don't do bomb repim because she doesn't like her so I think maybe there's more division of opinion on some of those novels that you might think I like reading everything I like middle brow I like low brow I like trash I like Shakespeare I think that's the real that's the true literary life right so I would say bomb repim is properly rated by me whether she's

too popular and people should read a little bit more Edmund Spencer maybe maybe science fiction another thing that I'm trying to read more of because it's kind of a gap for me it's I was not one of those children who read a lot of science fiction they of the triffids is from European people and that's quite good I read that at school and I did like it I just read is it Mortal Engines by Stanislaw Lem the robot fairy tale yes there's were pretty interesting it's not Solaris

but it was good and I'm watching pluribus because I feel like if I'm doing sci-fi I have to

watching there as well I've only seen the first two episodes so I feel like I don't quite

understand it I don't really understand how an RNA can join everyone's minds together

“I think silly right but that's just the premise I'm just supposed to assume that there's some”

like crazy physics that we're not going to tell you or something you're allowed to assume that the world of Star Wars exists right yeah as long as the rest of the story is consistent yeah but I so far I really like it and I think the idea of people some of the people want to join what's been called the hive mind I don't think that's the right phrase really but some of them want to join in some of them don't and I think that's the right dynamic to focus on

what's the best portrait of mental illness in English fiction might be swift in tail of a tub I don't have anything I have a good answer for that I don't think we're very good at mental illness in English fiction Septimus in Mrs. Dalloway is anyone good at it are the Russians good at it yeah Google Google's really good at it your book on late bloomers it's called second act why did it do so well what what chord did it strike with the it's readers and the public

maybe it didn't do as well as you think the fact that we're talking about it mean it did well

“it would be my I think a lot of people want to be a late bloomer and that it was I mean I”

explicitly argued against this but it was always implicitly selling the idea that you might be a late

bloomer if only if only right and I think a lot of people want a serious answer to that question and so far the other things that have been written about late bloomers tend to be sort of here are some people who did really well and they had resilience and they had stamina and you can do it too and never give up and I think a lot of people want to realize to the question not that kind of thing so in late bloomers do bloom late what is it that has changed to make it

certainly work there are several examples when something very dramatic happens in the external life of the person someone shoots themselves they get caught in a hotel fire something like that and they turn around after that event and say okay I simply have to change everything this cannot

carry on and there is another category of late bloomers where there isn't there's sort of an external

crisis or it's not very it's not such a sharp moment of crisis but they kind of become their own interruption and I think I think those people are very interesting they can look at themselves in the mirror and say really you're going to die without doing it you know you're not getting any younger let's go let's go do it now and that attitude is worth a lot there's a grandma mosa exhibit on right now in Washington DC oh I will have to be American museum I will have to go I love

her paintings and she blooms very late right where oh he has 70's very very late and what do you think clicked in her she's a great example of external circumstances she was working as a house servant I think age of 12 or 14 and then she married a farmer and you know they were in the fields all day every day and she had children and she lived at a time without the convenience of white goods in the home and she did not really have the ability to sit down and do painting and it was when she retired

she started making she would stitch her pictures and I think it was her sister in law who brought

“her some art materials and said these stitching are very good but you should paint and she had”

done arts and crafts as a child but it had been cut off by going to work so she's a really good example of someone where it once she has the time back it can flourish again will fiction be able to deal seriously again with religion I mean presumably well it hasn't done so for a while Marilyn Robinson arguably has she was a guest on this show but most of the examples you think of are quite a bit earlier when when dreams Evelyn woe will a cathar maybe dusty oski for that matter

I don't like dusty oski but he dealt seriously with religion right yeah sure sure sure I'm hesitating because I know that there are writers on substack who are more religious than I am who would point to various modern novels I don't think they would say they are great novels but they would say that there is there is fiction out there that's dealing with it now when we'll get another Graham green or a Muriel spark for that matter I don't know I don't think it would be too long

there are a lot of religious young people now and fiction will give them a you know an outlet for that it hasn't there been a lot of atheist writers and isn't that a sort of like the margin aim is obsession with being an atheist sort of over the way it's been bad for literature on it oh agreed but it's a way of dealing with religion right sure so I I'm not sure how much it ever left but I wouldn't be surprised if you know 20 years maybe a late bloomer will do it

no I think it'll be a young person and I suspect it will largely be converts you think late bloomers

forward into something new man who have multiple careers are to be envied some David O'Govie it's the it's the ultimate anti-border is fine Randall 8 Bloomer or maybe I haven't read enough of her books to make a good judgment but if we accept that Atlas shrugged his singular then yeah

“she's a late bloomer and I think that's an extraordinarily good novel I loved reading that book”

what made it interesting to you well Hollis Robbins told me to read it and I had always not read it

because I had met actual Randians like fully paid up objectives and I just thought get me away from this party I've got to leave and of course she's famous for being nasty and having bad ideas and all that kind of thing so when Hollis recommended I thought okay this is a totally different kind of recommendation so I will definitely take this and it was just so exciting on the plot level like it's maybe the best genre novel ever written and then you get all this like first rate

be movie dialogue, Humphrey Bogart if Humphrey Bogart had been in the film of Atlas shrugged it would have

“been brilliant and then you know it is actually interesting some people I think are blocked from”

enjoying it because they're so anti-her philosophy but it is actually interesting to see how unclunky her handling of ideas is in the best moments of the novel right the party scenes some of the arguments about the train obviously the three-hour speech is quite wearing for anyone but at other times I think she's more subtle than she's given credit for the villains are remarkably true yeah current life I find yeah the villains were a revelation to me what is your best child rearing advice

I worked in a school a long time ago and I was told I think I was told the way to deal with

“boys is fun firm and fair but I think that's boys and girls and I think you know you should be”

involved but not to involved give them give them their own space let them be children last two

questions first let's say we have listeners who now want to read measure for measure or they want to

reread it what advice or insight would you give them to make this a more fruitful reading or rereading or to make it more accessible or more interesting whatever some people want footnotes and some people don't so don't let me tell you you must read every footnote in the art in addition and understand every little thing if you just want to get to the end and find out what happened and then go back and look at it more closely and I think some people some people in my experience I've run

Shakespeare book clubs online they don't want the painful blow by blow but some people really do so make that decision for yourself file question what will you do next I'm tempted to keep it a secret that's fine so I won't say as I have a lot of things in my draft folder and maybe some of them

will get published somewhere to close I'll just recommend again Henry's book second act about late

bloomers Henry's substack just google Henry Oliver's substack and Henry's new joint substack with Rebecca Lowe Henry Oliver thank you very much thank you Tyler this was a lot of fun thanks for listening to conversations with Tyler you can subscribe to the show on apple podcasts Spotify or your favorite podcast app if you like this podcast please consider giving us a rating and leaving a review this helps other listeners find the show on Twitter I'm at Tyler

Cowan and the show is at Cowan Convoes until next time please keep listening and learning