I am one of those who was (almost) terminally turned off Shakespeare (the plays) by English literature classes at school. The pace of reading was funereally slow, the footnote-strewn words dead on the page, & then we had to write boring essays with titles like ‘A character study of Macbeth.’
I might finally get round to realise my, until now half-hearted, resolution to read all the plays (perhaps when confined to my bed in the old lady’s home), after the revelation, (merci Daniel Tammet , that, on top of everything else, there are interesting references to the new mathematics.
Shakespeare would have been one of the first generation of English schoolboys to learn about the figure – cypher, place holder – zero, along with the Arabic system of numerals – thanks to Robert Recorde’s textbook The Grounde of Artes, Teachying the Worke & Practise of Arithmetike, (1st ed 1543, expanded 1550).
Learning about the mysteries of place value & a number which is no number left their traces on the Shakespearean imagination.
For example, in Cymbeline:
Three thousand confident, that act as many -
For three performers are the file, when all
The rest do nothing – with this word ‘Stand, stand’,
Accommodated by the place
And then this coda from Tammet himself:
In the Globe Theatre, round as an O, an empty cipher filled with meaning, Shakespeare’s loquacious quill drew crowds with his dreams.
I wish I had had a book like this when I was a child – interested in both words & numbers but defeated by school mathematics; see the essay ‘Classroom intuitions’
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