Much Ado About Numbers E-Book

Rob Eastaway

• Herausgeber: Allen & Unwin
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 262

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

'A spectacular journey... Highly recommended!' Dr Simon Smith, The Shakespeare Institute 'A fascinating and hugely entertaining guide to Shakespearean mathematics.' ProfSarah Hart, author of Once Upon A Prime 'A playful and engaging book ... bound to excite the appetite of all Shakespeare junkies.' Patrick Spottiswoode, Founder, Shakespeare's Globe Education 'Instead of cleaving maths and English in twain, Eastaway brings them together to surprise and delight the reader.'Dr Rebecca Fisher, The English Association 'The Bard by Numbers, brilliantly accounted for by Rob Eastaway.' Johnny Ball 'This quirky little book will multiply the fun for any general reader interested in adding to their understanding of Shakespeare.' The Washington Post A fascinating new take on the world of Shakespeare. What's the connection between Shakespeare and maths? A lot, as it turns out! Shakespeare grew up in a time of remarkable mathematical innovation. From astronomy to probability, music to multiplication, new mathematical ideas were taking off - and much of this was reflected in his work. In this highly engaging book, award-winning author Rob Eastaway explores the surprising and entertaining ways that maths and numbers crop up in Shakespeare's plays. Find out how Tudors multiplied, why Shakespeare never ended a line with the word orange, and why dice-playing was a serious hazard for the unwary. With historical asides about games, optics, astronomy, music and magic, you will never think about maths, history or Shakespeare the same way again.

Leseprobe

Acclaim for Much Ado About Numbers

‘You can count on both Rob Eastaway and Shakespeare to makemathematics entertaining, never more so than in this elegant tomewhich will make your Pericles tingle as you like it.’– Sir Tim Rice

‘A spectacular journey . . . Highly recommended!’– Dr Simon Smith, associate professor of Shakespeare and earlymodern drama, The Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham

“A fascinating and hugely entertaining guide toShakespearean mathematics.”– Professor Sarah Hart, Gresham College,author of Once Upon a Prime

‘Eastaway’s playful and engaging book is packed witha dazzling array of historical facts, and is bound to excitethe appetite of all Shakespeare junkies.’– Patrick Spottiswoode, founder, Shakespeare’s Globe Education

‘Instead of cleaving maths and English in twain, Eastawaybrings them together to surprise and delight the reader – and ourunderstanding of Shakespeare’s life and works is all the richer for it.The perfect book for students and teachers of mathsand English alike.’– Dr Rebecca Fisher,The English Association

ALSO BY ROB EASTAWAY

Maths on the Back of an EnvelopeHow Many Socks Make a Pair?What Is A Googly?Any Ideas?

WITH MIKE ASKEW

Maths for Mums and DadsMaths on the Go

WITH JEREMY WYNDHAM

Why Do Buses Come in Threes?How Long Is a Piece of String?

WITH BRIAN HOBBS

Headscratchers

First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2024 by Allen & Unwin, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

This paperback edition published in 2025 by Allen & Unwin.

Copyright © Rob Eastaway, 2024

The moral right of Rob Eastaway to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

The picture acknowledgements on p. 205 constitute an extension of this copyright page.

No part of this book may be used in any manner in the learning, training or development of generative artificial intelligence technologies (including but not limited to machine learning models and large language models (LLMs)), whether by data scraping, data mining or use in any way to create or form a part of data sets or in any other way.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Paperback ISBN: 978 180546 029 9

E-book ISBN: 978 180546 028 2

Text design by carrdesignstudio.com

Printed in Great Britain

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CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

I. SHAKESPEAREAN NUMBERS

A Playfulness with Numbers

Huge Numbers

Much Ado About Nothing

2. SCHOOL LIFE

Maths at Grammar School

The Book of Arithmetic

The Seven Liberal Arts

Girls and Maths

3. SPORT AND GAMES

Anyone for Tennis? Or Football?

Hazard and Risk

Nine Men’s Morris

Noddy, Primero and Other Card Games

4. MONEY

Shakespearean Currency

Shakespeare the Accountant?

Borrowing, Lending and Interest

5. MEASURE FOR MEASURE

An Era of Imprecise Measurements

Length and Distance

Telling the Time

Navigation and Maps

6. MUSIC, RHYTHM AND DANCE

The Measure of Dance

Patterns of Verse

Rhyming Patterns

Music as a Mathematical Subject 102

The Music of the Spheres

7. ASTRONOMY AND ASTROLOGY

Telescopes and Horoscopes

Ruled by the Seven Planets

The Science of Astronomy

The New Calendar

8. COLOURS AND THE RAINBOW

Rainbows in Shakespeare’s World

Shakespeare’s Colours

The Emerging Maths of Colour

9. PUTTING INK TO PAPER

Writing with a Quill

Writing with Ink

Arrival of the Pencil

Printing and Publishing

I0. MATHEMATICS, MAGIC AND WITCHCRAFT

John Dee, Mathematician and Magician

The Book of Magic

Think of a Number

II. CODES AND CONSPIRACY

Secret Messages and Chronograms

Acrostics and Other Hidden Words

Numerology and Codes

Shakespeare’s Calculator

APPENDIX: MATHEMATICAL ASIDES

Tactics for Winning at Three Men’s Morris

The Pythagorean Octave and Dorian Mode

Shakespeare, Orange and Sir Isaac Newton

Philip Henslowe’s Diary

Francis Bacon’s Cipher System

A Shakespeare/Historic Event Timeline

Timeline of Shakespeare’s Plays and Poems

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Picture Credits

Index

About the Author

PROLOGUE

The idea for this book was sown in Stratford-upon-Avon. Where else? The Mathematical Association, an august body that has represented teachers and general mathematicians for over a hundred years, had decided to hold its 2022 annual conference in William Shakespeare’s hometown. And that gave me the germ of an idea.

Stratford is of course still steeped in Shakespeare. Dominating the town is the huge Royal Shakespeare Theatre looking out towards the River Avon. The river is spanned by the fourteen-arch Clopton Bridge that Shakespeare would have traversed many times on his travels. Several half-timbered buildings survive from the sixteenth century, including the house in Henley Street where Shakespeare was born.

My friend Andrew Jeffrey and I had put ourselves forward to run a joint workshop at the teacher conference, as we have often done in the past. It would be our usual hour of light-hearted pick-and-mix mathematical curiosities.

But the location caught my imagination. Following the old rule that you’re more creative if you put a constraint on yourself, I suggested that we theme our workshop on Shakespeare. Why not pick out Shakespearean quotes and link them to mathematical concepts? We could do a slot about the use of zero and call it Much Ado About Nothing, another one about fractions called Henry the Fifth (aka Henry the 20%), and dotted throughout there could be a Comedy of Maths Errors. Cheesy, yes, but we knew our audience.

The curious thing, however, was that the more I hunted for superficial links between Shakespeare and mathematics, the more I realized that Shakespeare’s world was filled with much deeper mathematical ideas, and that many of them are reflected in his plays.

If you’d asked me about maths and Shakespeare before I started investigating it, I’d have dragged up hazy recollections about rhyming patterns in his verses, and also a mathematical rhythm in the way his lines were spoken, known as iambic pentameter. But it turns out that this is just the start of it. I have since uncovered numerous mathematical connections. As a result, a whimsical joke about Shakespearean maths that was originally intended for teachers at a conference has ended up as this book.

I have been told by many people that in writing a book about Shakespeare I am stepping into a lion’s den. There are thousands of academics, theatre producers, actors and historians across the world who have spent their lives studying Shakespeare, and there are countless books about him. His work has been analysed from just about every conceivable angle. Pick any topic – from horticulture to Harry Potter – and you’ll find somebody who has investigated its connection with Shakespeare. I might, however, be the first to have looked at his life and work through the prism of maths.

Before I embarked on this book, my knowledge of Shakespeare was typical of somebody who studied him at school (Richard III was my O Level play – I loved it) and who has then seen a couple of dozen productions on stage or screen, dotted through my adult life.

Happily, I now know considerably more about Shakespeare than I did when I started writing this book. It has been a joyful adventure. My research has taken me to the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, the real tennis court at Hampton Court, the graphite mines of Cumbria, the inner sanctum of Oxford’s Bodleian Library and the salvaged wreck of the Mary Rose ship in Portsmouth. I’ve spoken to historians of musical instruments, glove-making, taxation, art restoration, astronomy, stationery, card games and magic. And, of course, I have read plenty of books and spoken to plenty of Shakespeare experts too.

It is worth pointing out that, aside from the plays and poems that he wrote, we know remarkably little about Shakespeare the man, and what he studied or said. This lack of biographical detail means it is very easy to make wild speculations. I could, for example, claim that Shakespeare used to practise his times tables at breakfast, spend lunchtime totting up the accounts for the Globe theatre, and spend the evening winning money with loaded dice, in the confidence that nobody can be certain that I’m wrong. I will avoid such speculation, but, as you’ll see, there is plenty of evidence that Shakespeare was aware of many of the mathematical ideas that were circulating in his lifetime, and that he incorporated many of them in his work.

You might ask ‘Is this mainly a maths book or a Shakespeare book?’ I would reply that arguably it is a history book. Or maybe a science book. Or even a book about language, music and the arts. The truth is that it is a bit of all of them, because they are all connected. In the modern world, anyone who takes an interest in arithmetic or algebra might be described as a maths person. But that is partly because we live in a binary world, where you are assumed to be interested in either the mathematical subjects or the arts, not both. In Elizabethan times, things were different.

The fact that leading mathematicians of that period, such as John Dee and Thomas Harriot, also experimented with optics, chemistry, map-making, seafaring and other diverse activities shows how blurred the edges were between different fields that are now distinct areas of study. It was a time when curiosity wasrewarded because there were so many things still to be discovered and explained. This was the English Renaissance, and these were Renaissance men, living (for much of their lives) under a queen who was a Renaissance woman.

Shakespeare was born in 1564, at a time when there were huge advances happening in just about every sphere of life – in science, in the arts and of course in maths itself. The radical astronomical ideas of Copernicus, who had suggested that the universe was centred around the sun rather than the earth, were a matter of huge religious and public debate in the late 1500s; arithmetic was becoming an essential skill for anyone involved in trade or business, be that manufacturing gloves (as Shakespeare’s father did) or running a theatre; and music, regarded at the time as being a mathematical subject, was in the middle of its own revolution.

On the high seas, Walter Raleigh was one of the many adventurers opening up the world for exploration, which required increasingly advanced navigation skills. There was a huge growth in international trade as England developed a taste for exotic foods and spices; and at home the growth of mining and textiles was building the foundations for the Industrial Revolution that would finally explode a few generations later. Recreation was also taking off, with the invention of a plethora of sports and games, many of which provided a popular vehicle for gambling, which had a mathematics all of its own.

In this book I will be reflecting on the mathematics of Shakespeare’s world as much as maths in his plays: from games to astronomy, and from measurement to magic.

In 1592, the playwright Robert Greene, who famously described William Shakespeare as an ‘upstart crow’, also called him a ‘Johannes factotum’. That second description was particularly snide, as it is a variant of ‘Jack of all trades’.

My sense of Shakespeare, however, is that he was an all-rounder in the best sense of the word, who was knowledgeable and curious about the world around him. And, while he wasn’t a ‘mathematician’, he had a particular aptitude for numbers, and a mathematical mind.

A rounded education in Elizabethan England was assumed to include an in-depth understanding of the classics but also of mathematics. If you were interested in history, the sciences, languages or music, you were free to explore them, and to serendipitously find connections between them. That is the spirit in which I have written this book.