YouSaid · the spoken record

Henry Oliver

lines on the record: 82
first: 2026-03-04
most recent: 2026-03-04
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Some people want footnotes and some people don't. So don't let me tell you you must read every footnote in the Arden Edition 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 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.”
2026-03-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Oliver on Measure for Measure, Late Bloomers, and the Smartest Writers in English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. I think that's boys and girls, and I think, you know, you should be involved but not too involved. Give them their own space. Let them be children”
2026-03-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Oliver on Measure for Measure, Late Bloomers, and the Smartest Writers in English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 it, 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. It's maybe the best genre novel ever written. And then you get all this like first rate B 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.”
2026-03-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Oliver on Measure for Measure, Late Bloomers, and the Smartest Writers in English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 objectivists, and I just thought,”
2026-03-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Oliver on Measure for Measure, Late Bloomers, and the Smartest Writers in English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe. I haven't read enough of her books to make a good judgment, but if we accept that Atlas Shrugged is singular, then yeah, she's a late bloomer. And I think that's an extraordinarily good novel. I loved reading that book.”
2026-03-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Oliver on Measure for Measure, Late Bloomers, and the Smartest Writers in English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because you can leave behind the bad thing and move forward into something new. Men who have multiple careers are to be envied, said David Ogilvy. It's the ultimate antiboredom.”
2026-03-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Oliver on Measure for Measure, Late Bloomers, and the Smartest Writers in English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, agreed, but it's a way of dealing with religion, right? So, I'm not sure how much it ever left, but I wouldn't be surprised if 20 years.”
2026-03-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Oliver on Measure for Measure, Late Bloomers, and the Smartest Writers in English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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 an outlet for that. Haven't there been a lot of atheist writers, and isn't that a sort of, like the Martin Amos obsession with being an atheist, sort of the way it's bad?”
2026-03-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Oliver on Measure for Measure, Late Bloomers, and the Smartest Writers in English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She is a great example of external circumstances. She was working as a house servant, I think, at the 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 stitchings 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 wearing once she has the time back it can flourish again.”
2026-03-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Oliver on Measure for Measure, Late Bloomers, and the Smartest Writers in English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 OK, 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 such a sharp moment of crisis, but they kind of become their own interruption. And 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 and do it now. And that attitude is worth a lot.”
2026-03-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Oliver on Measure for Measure, Late Bloomers, and the Smartest Writers in English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 a real answer to the question, not that kind of thing.”
2026-03-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Oliver on Measure for Measure, Late Bloomers, and the Smartest Writers in English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Might be swift in Tale of a Tub. I don't think 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?”
2026-03-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Oliver on Measure for Measure, Late Bloomers, and the Smartest Writers in English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but 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 and some of them don't. And I think that's the right dynamic to focus on.”
2026-03-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Oliver on Measure for Measure, Late Bloomers, and the Smartest Writers in English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. Well, that's silly.”
2026-03-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Oliver on Measure for Measure, Late Bloomers, and the Smartest Writers in English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Those 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 do some TV as well, right?”
2026-03-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Oliver on Measure for Measure, Late Bloomers, and the Smartest Writers in English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Another thing that I'm trying to read more of because it's kind of a gap for me. I was not one of those children who read a lot of science fiction.”
2026-03-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Oliver on Measure for Measure, Late Bloomers, and the Smartest Writers in English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I actually quite like Barbara Pym. One thing that's surprising is that I think it's Persephone books, the lady who runs that, who has republished many, many interesting 20th century women writers. They don't do Barbara Pym because she doesn't like her. So I think maybe there's more division of opinion on some of those novels than you might think. I like reading everything. I like Middlebrow. I like lowbrow. I like trash. I like Shakespeare. I think that's the true literary life, right? So I would say Barbara Pym is properly rated by me, whether she's too popular and people should read a little bit more Edmund Spencer. Yeah, maybe, maybe.”
2026-03-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Oliver on Measure for Measure, Late Bloomers, and the Smartest Writers in English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I see. 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 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”
2026-03-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Oliver on Measure for Measure, Late Bloomers, and the Smartest Writers in English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. And I think a lot of people in Washington would find it instructive and amusing to read that novel. And it's quite short.”
2026-03-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Oliver on Measure for Measure, Late Bloomers, and the Smartest Writers in English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 used to buy them on the day they came out I was young when they came out and just read straight through them and then never think about them again but sort of say these were really good. That's to me the right rating. Dressing up and going to King's Cross Station without any children I find to be an act of overrating the books. But they are really, really good and this Harold Bloom thing about, oh, they're full of clich ⁇ s and it's deadening young minds and stuff, that's just rubbish.”
2026-03-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Oliver on Measure for Measure, Late Bloomers, and the Smartest Writers in English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, no, sure, sure, sure. Lord of the Rings plus the Hobbit, right? I will say properly rated by the fans and underrated by the highbrows who dismiss it or the ones who haven't read it, which is some of them who dismiss it have not read it, and that is a known thing or secretly known thing. But it's clearly one of the great novels of the 20th century.”
2026-03-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Oliver on Measure for Measure, Late Bloomers, and the Smartest Writers in English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2026-03-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Oliver on Measure for Measure, Late Bloomers, and the Smartest Writers in English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2026-03-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Oliver on Measure for Measure, Late Bloomers, and the Smartest Writers in English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I do think even if you just read the bits of Spencer that are in the Oxbook 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.”
2026-03-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Oliver on Measure for Measure, Late Bloomers, and the Smartest Writers in English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do happen to agree with that particular statement. Johnson's allowed to be wrong a couple of times, and that's one of his clunkers.”
2026-03-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Oliver on Measure for Measure, Late Bloomers, and the Smartest Writers in English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 don't know what I was being advertised. I don't know what product it was, no one showed me anything useful. The real creative revolution happened in the 50s under David Ogilvy, and he joined the hard cell 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 at 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 everyone knows that that's what works, but they want to be cool. They want to do the creative revolution. And we just get these adverts that suck.”
2026-03-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Oliver on Measure for Measure, Late Bloomers, and the Smartest Writers in English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 genes in the ad.”
2026-03-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Oliver on Measure for Measure, Late Bloomers, and the Smartest Writers in English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's counterintuitive and it's clever and it's funny. But really the Beatle would have sold itself, and some of the people who wrote those adverts actually say that in their memos why we're writing these adult itself. And it led to this kind of advertising that was very prevalent when I was growing up in the 90s and the 80s. Do you remember that Levi's advert? It's set in 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.”
2026-03-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Oliver on Measure for Measure, Late Bloomers, and the Smartest Writers in English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I like modernism too, but it made some terrible mistakes. And what they did was they said, We're going to get rid of all this hard sell stuff. It's boring. The adverts, 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 handful of adverts, like think small, where instead of selling you a big car that got bigger every year with lots of features, they sell you the little beetle.”
2026-03-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Oliver on Measure for Measure, Late Bloomers, and the Smartest Writers in English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My adverts, the instrument of the immortals. Have you brought great music into your home? And the woman in the dress at the piano? You're sort of buying a whole mood, right? Or a vibe. The peak of that is like the tiger on the frosty's cereal packet. You don't need words or the Marlborough man. You buy these cigarettes, you're going to look like that cowboy in that shirt and you're going to smoke and you're going to feel like a man and it's just going to be like great, right? Cause light does that now. Then there was this terrible, terrible thing called the Creative Revolution in the nineteen sixties, where supposedly, this is like the modernism of advertising.”
2026-03-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Oliver on Measure for Measure, Late Bloomers, and the Smartest Writers in English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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 cures headaches three times quicker than other brands. We did a study. thirty eight percent of you know right and you just hammer it all the time the other advertising school is the sort of image based right so arthur rubicam wrote those wonderful stuff”
2026-03-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Oliver on Measure for Measure, Late Bloomers, and the Smartest Writers in English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2026-03-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Oliver on Measure for Measure, Late Bloomers, and the Smartest Writers in English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Swift is very, very good at advertising. If you wanted to be abuse, you could reframe his whole career as an exercise in lobbying and PR and realize that no one's ever been as good at it as he was, right?”
2026-03-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Oliver on Measure for Measure, Late Bloomers, and the Smartest Writers in English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 writers were very good advertisers of their own work, of their own ideas. Swift.”
2026-03-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Oliver on Measure for Measure, Late Bloomers, and the Smartest Writers in English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because advertising is not a great art, and to apply the principles of advertising to literature would be a diminishment.”
2026-03-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Oliver on Measure for Measure, Late Bloomers, and the Smartest Writers in English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think temperament is important because that's what informs the creation of the book originally, right? Austin'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 reacting to her content.”
2026-03-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Oliver on Measure for Measure, Late Bloomers, and the Smartest Writers in English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2026-03-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Oliver on Measure for Measure, Late Bloomers, and the Smartest Writers in English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 berating prostitutes, and you see a little bit of the double edgedness of what he's doing, and then I would maybe read the journal to Stella because it's a very lively and very, very good observation. 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. Drapeer's letter is some of the best work he ever did, right?”
2026-03-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Oliver on Measure for Measure, Late Bloomers, and the Smartest Writers in English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“While 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 composition of politics, to do with the conduct of a war or something, in both a fictional and a non-fictional manner. And he can make those arguments either with the kind of directness and polemicism 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 nonfiction, arguing. So Swift, I think, has the balance there, noting that Shakespeare far exceeds him on the fictional side. Even though Gulliver's travels must be one of the very few great books ever written in English.”
2026-03-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Oliver on Measure for Measure, Late Bloomers, and the Smartest Writers in English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I found it very useful to have read that book before I worked in politics, and I was often startled. I was a very low-level, bag carrier sort of person, so I would occasionally overhear 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.”
2026-03-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Oliver on Measure for Measure, Late Bloomers, and the Smartest Writers in English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. It will give you empathy. It will make you a nice person. It will do all the, we'll show you how the people think. But of course, you can get that in nonfiction or in conversation or 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 pass straight through you as a nice story. So I'm very persuaded that empathy works in a Smithian 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 most moral philosophers, they've done all this moral philosophy and they've published great work. It doesn't seem to have changed their personal morality very much.”
2026-03-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Oliver on Measure for Measure, Late Bloomers, and the Smartest Writers in English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of the objects that Gulliver's have in his pockets, the watches and things, you know, Smith talks about the triviality of these objects, but also their use and benefit. I think he's clearly interested in that. Surprisingly, for such a liberal-minded person, he endorses Richardson and says Richardson is the good novelist to read to learn morals. Maybe the most surprising thing he says in a moral and literary context. I don't know how much he took directly from Shakespeare. To me, he seems more interested in some of the later writers.”
2026-03-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Oliver on Measure for Measure, Late Bloomers, and the Smartest Writers in English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Smith is clearly taking a lot from the novelists of the 18th century. He loves Gulliver's 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 a model.”
2026-03-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Oliver on Measure for Measure, Late Bloomers, and the Smartest Writers in English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Shan Austin loved going to see Shakespeare, but I think she probably loved going to see Mrs. Siddens 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 read 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 as very much her own writer and her own sort of thinker.”
2026-03-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Oliver on Measure for Measure, Late Bloomers, and the Smartest Writers in English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, whose head are we in, what information are 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 a very, very Smithian idea.”
2026-03-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Oliver on Measure for Measure, Late Bloomers, and the Smartest Writers in English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If I had to pick one of the whales, but all of the whales was. Yeah, 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 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 Rylance and Stephen Fry in twelfth night. That's a very, very good production.”
2026-03-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Oliver on Measure for Measure, Late Bloomers, and the Smartest Writers in English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 Miran is in that version of measure for measure, and she might make it. I can see that she would make a great Isabella.”
2026-03-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Oliver on Measure for Measure, Late Bloomers, and the Smartest Writers in English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The words properly, and then it's varied dramatic. But in general, I agree with you that reading is better than watching.”
2026-03-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Oliver on Measure for Measure, Late Bloomers, and the Smartest Writers in English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The guys at the inns of court will come and see this play and 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 will kind of give you a bad idea of Shakespeare and the directors I think are too interventionist. They come up with these crazy schemes and metaphors and it just distracts. The one good production of this I've seen was done by amateurs, students at Rada 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 are 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, no, we shan't 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 can be a great performance, right? Hamlet's often done like that, just a dark stage and everyone's saying.”
2026-03-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Oliver on Measure for Measure, Late Bloomers, and the Smartest Writers in English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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 about the folio necessarily, but he knew the quarters, but I think a third or a half of the 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.”
2026-03-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Henry Oliver on Measure for Measure, Late Bloomers, and the Smartest Writers in English · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source