Tyler Cowen and Henry Oliver had a discussion over Measure for Measure. Who is right? Is light a wave or a particle?

Close reading, directorial vision, and the case for serious interpretation

I found myself circling the interpretation disagreement in Henry Oliver’s Conversation with Tyler that to me encompasses a larger question about a reader/audience/director bringing their view to a work.

It brings to my mind the practical consideration of new theatre writing where there can be a tension between implementing the writer’s vision or the director’s (or others’ vision). Famously, Beckett disliked his vision being touched so directors even now mostly implement his vision (of their views of it) rather than a more interpretive or distant vision.

Turning to the question in hand. Recap:

Measure for Measure is one of Shakespeare’s dark comedies, set in Vienna, where the Duke hands power to the severe Angelo, who begins brutally enforcing moral laws that had long been ignored. When Angelo sentences Claudio to death for getting his fiancée pregnant, Claudio’s sister Isabella, who is about to enter a convent, pleads for mercy and is drawn into a corrupt bargain that exposes the hypocrisy of law, power and sexual morality. In the end the Duke returns in disguise to manipulate events toward a formal resolution, but the play leaves an uneasy aftertaste about justice, coercion and virtue.

The narrow question was about Measure for Measure.

COWEN: 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. Bastardy and cuckoldry—they’re almost everywhere.

Throughout the play, there’re so many references to brother and sister when people are not, in fact, literal brothers and sisters, but you’re led to wonder, are they maybe half-brothers, half-sisters? Because we’re in this strange world where people are just going crazy with illegitimate births and couplings. It’s really about, if there’s that much sex and procreation in a society, is not a form of incest everywhere? How do people negotiate this in their lives and in politics, since incest is one of the greatest sins?

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. 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 already wanted to retreat from it altogether into the convent.

Henry Oliver can not accept Tyler Cowen’s reading of the play (on “I did Yield to him”) as Henry doesn’t see it in the text.

Tyler is drawn to the possibility that Isabella is not simply a pure, fixed moral presence who resists Angelo in a straightforward way, but that the play leaves open something more erotically ambiguous, perhaps even implicating her in the exchange in a way that is uncomfortable and unstable.

Cowen: in act 5, scene 1, there’s even a mention where she says—I’m not sure how literally to take this—that she did yield to Claudio, and I’m never sure what to make of that one sentence.

[Me: “And I did yield to him”]

…It’s a lone sentence. It pops up; it goes away. It’s as if you’re not supposed to notice it. What really ever happened? When she goes initially to Angelo and talks about how virtuous she is and the entreaties I’m making you, and they’re the strongest of all possible entreaties. 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 going to agree with this point….

Henry’s pushback, as I understand it, is that this is not really what the text is doing on a narrow or more literal reading. The plot mechanics do not require it. The dramatic context does not support it very strongly. If one is simply asking, “What most likely happened?” then Tyler is probably overreaching.

That seems fair enough and even true on a close reading, keeping to the text.

Still, I would argue, there is a difference between a reading that best fits the immediate dramatic action and a reading that is trying to prise open a deeper tension in the work. Henry is defending the former. Tyler is reaching for the latter.

What became more interesting to me was not whether Tyler is “right” in the most literal sense, but what kind of rightness we are even talking about.

There is a narrow, almost forensic way of reading a text, where the task is to reconstruct what happened, what the scene most plausibly means, what Shakespeare is most likely doing at the level of plot and immediate intention. On that level, Henry - I think is - correct. This is a form of close reading. This reading is also done by actors and directors looking at Shakespeare and all types of play.

But there is also another kind of reading, less literal, less close and more interpretive, where the point is not simply to decide what happened, but to notice what a work makes possible, what it invites, what kinds of unease it generates even if it stops short of spelling them out. (This type of reading may well have a higher chance to fail in awkward ways but it can also open up new ways of looking at work.)

That is where Barthes, and the cluster of ideas around reader-response and post-authorial criticism, become useful. This view argues that a work of art does not belong entirely to its maker once it enters the world.

The idea does not license nonsense, and certainly not every reading is equally valid. But the concept is that the audience’s perspective, and likewise a reader’s or director’s interpretation, has a legitimate share in shaping meaning.

Meaning is not only deposited by an author and retrieved intact by a careful reader. It is made, or at least completed, in the encounter between text and reader.

This perhaps has more weight with time. The meaning we give cave art is our modern day meaning, we can not possibly know what the original artists (and whether they even considered themselves artists) thought or meant. The interpretation is mostly the viewer’s.

The defence of Tyler is not, or should not be, that he has discovered a hidden factual truth that Henry has missed. It is that his reading may still have serious value because it emerges from a real engagement with the play’s language and tensions. The words themselves are slippery. The sexual politics of the play are slippery. Isabella’s role in the moral universe of the play is slippery. Tyler is responding to that instability. He may be pressing too hard on one possible implication, but he is not inventing the instability from nowhere.

That matters, because Measure for Measure is one of those plays where purity, coercion, power and desire do not sit neatly in separate boxes. Even virtue becomes vulnerable to misreading, appropriation and pressure. Isabella is not simply a moral principle walking through the plot untouched by the world around her. She is a woman in a world where male authority reads, frames and uses female virtue. Tyler’s stronger claim, I think, is not finally about whether she “did” or “did not” do something in a hidden, literal sense. It is that the play is saturated with a discomfort in which chastity itself becomes erotically charged, socially legible, and politically manipulable.

Put differently, Henry may be asking the right question for one kind of criticism, but Tyler may be asking the right question for another. Henry is asking: what does the scene most straightforwardly support? Tyler is asking: what does the scene make thinkable? Those are not identical questions.

This would also be of note when it comes to performance. Does one lean into a close reading or does one lean into an interpretation which echoes but is not solely in the text? Lean too far and you lose the intent but lean enough and you create perhaps novel, interesting art.

One distinction (which is contested) is that this is not an “anything goes” position. Serious interpretation still requires discipline. It still has to answer to the text. It still has to arise from language, structure, pattern, mood, pressure, contradiction. There is a world of difference between a reading that is contestable and a reading that is arbitrary. Tyler’s reading may be contestable, but that is not the same as arbitrary. It comes from a serious attempt to read the play as literature rather than as plot summary.

Though in modern performance you can lean so far away as to seem arbitrary and I think many viewers find this a step too far. Then again, done brilliantly, perhaps it can open up new worlds.

Still, I think that is where a Barthes-inflected defence lands most cleanly where an interpretation is still tied to the text, albeit loosely.

One does not need to say Tyler wins the narrow textual argument in order to say he is doing something worthwhile. One can argue that interpretive authority does not belong solely to authorial intention, nor solely to the most conservative reconstruction of events. A reading can be legitimate if it is textually provoked, critically serious, and illuminating, even if it remains debatable and even if it is not the reading most scholars or directors would choose as their default.

In that sense, the dispute is not really Tyler versus Henry. It is two models of reading held side by side. One asks for textual restraint. The other is willing to follow ambiguity further, to see whether the pressure points in the work open onto a darker, stranger or less pious vision than the obvious one. The best criticism probably needs both instincts. Or at least this makes it more satisfying. Hence this whole conversation segment is insightful for those interested. The chat lends an echo as to what directors and actors argue about.

Henry may be right that Tyler’s reading is not the best literal account of what happens in the scene. But Tyler may still be right that the scene, and perhaps the play more broadly, is structured in such a way that his reading has genuine interpretive force. This is because strong works of art exceed any single paraphrase of their meaning. They remain open enough to support serious disagreement.

This is part of Shakespeare’s genius.

Coda: I take away a practical note for modern theatre writing.

The first showing of a piece, I think, should cling to the writer’s vision (although often the writer will work closely with the director and team).

But, on the small chance the work is great or popular enough to be shown again, then the writer (and original director) should let go and subsequent artists be allowed to add their own layers of vision (no matter how flawed).

In this, that is what we did with my/our reinterpretation of a Japanese Noh play that I had on at the Gate theatre 20 odd years ago. 2007 Guardian review here.

The idea also argues that Beckett is wrong (and the current Trust that handles Beckett’s work) is wrong to limit the playing of Beckett solely to the original Beckett vision (although I note the Trust is adhering to Beckett’s will). In doing so, Beckett limited his art and will fail to reach the heights of Shakespeare over the years, in part because of this. (Although give it enough centuries the Trust influence might wane as perhaps it is already).