Much Ado About Numbers
How Shakespeare and Maths can Enrich each other
23 April 2025
My daughter is a year away from her GCSEs, and it’s clear that her school life is now focused on those looming exams. Like most of her peers, at the end of Year 9 she was able to drop some subjects that she didn’t enjoy and choose others that she did enjoy. But there were of course two subjects for which she had no choice: Shakespeare (as a part of English Literature) and Maths.
It's partly because they are compulsory up to GCSE that both of these subjects cause angst and resentment among many teenagers. Teachers of both will be familiar with complaints such as “this is boring” and “when will I ever need this?” There is, however, a more positive connection between Shakespeare and Maths, one that can enrich both subjects, and add to the enjoyment too.
For the last couple of years, I’ve been visiting schools to give my talk Much Ado About Numbers about the surprising links between Shakespeare, Maths and Elizabethan History (another GCSE topic). I’ve reached nearly 10,000 Year 9s and 10s with this talk, and it’s been heartening to see teenagers who thought they hated Maths or Shakespeare - or both - leaving the talk buzzing with ideas and fun facts that they’d never considered before.
It was in 2022 that I first stumbled upon the fascinating links between Shakespeare and Maths. It happened serendipitously. I was invited to give a talk at a maths teacher conference in Stratford-upon-Avon. The location intrigued me, and I playfully wondered whether there’s any maths in Shakespeare. I started with a simple search for the word “mathematics”. And there it was (twice!) in The Taming of The Shrew. Hortensio, looking for a way to set up a private date with Bianca, decides to disguise himself as a tutor “of music and the mathematics”.
I soon learned that in Shakespeare’s time, music was regarded as one of the four mathematical subjects, the other three being arithmetic, geometry and astronomy, and there are hints of this in, for example, Romeo and Juliet, when Juliet talks about the lark singing “sweet division”. Other discoveries followed quickly. Most remarkable of all was finding that Shakespeare’s was the first generation in England to learn our modern ‘Indo-Arabic’ numerals, 1,2,3,4…. His father John would have been taught only Roman numerals. The ‘new’ methods of arithmetic had been known in the Arab world and Southern Europe, especially Italy, for hundreds of years. It’s astonishing that the concept of what we now call zero (but in Shakespeare’s day was known as ‘the cipher’) was an exciting novelty in late Elizabethan England.
More interesting still, Shakespeare was clearly intrigued by this symbol that represented nothing and yet could be used to make vast numbers. One example comes in the opening scene of Henry V, where the character Chorus asks the audience to think of him as a ‘crooked figure’ and his fellow actors as 'ciphers' and put them together to make an army of one million ("1 000000"). Shakespeare toyed with the mathematical notion of ‘nothing’ throughout his work - he even included it in the title of one of his greatest plays, of course.
When I’m visiting schools, I reveal how Shakespeare not only loved playing with numbers, but was also aware of some of the rapid advances in mathematics that were happening in his world. During Shakespeare’s lifetime, Galileo confirmed that the sun and not the earth was the centre of our universe, Mercator revolutionised the reliability of maps, music began to shift from modal to the modern major-minor form, length and weight measurements were standardised, clocks acquired an additional (minute) hand, and the English mathematician Thomas Harriot figured out how rainbows work. It was an astonishing period, when arts and sciences merged together, and it was not unusual for a leading figure such as Walter Raleigh to be an applied mathematician and a poet.
All of this has reinforced my belief that we should do more to find connections across the curriculum. Too often children encounter subjects like maths and Shakespeare and Elizabethan History in isolation, without any hint that they overlap. It’s encouraging that the English Association and the Maths Association are now working closely together to explore ways in which they can collaborate, and I’m pleased that in some schools, English, History and Maths departments are beginning to join forces. Maths and the Humanities were once deeply intertwined, and perhaps that bond can be restored in future. With a bit of imagination, every school subject can intersect with every other subject. And that includes Shakespeare and maths.
Much Ado About Numbers is now available in paperback from all good bookstores
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