Shakespeare’s forgotten legacy: hyperbolic numbers

Tim Harford

There is a theory that Shakespeare was an accountant. How else to explain the detailed use of bookkeeping metaphors in his writing? “We shall not spend a large expense of time/ Before we reckon with your several loves,” declares Malcolm in Macbeth, “And make us even with you.”

The jailer in Cymbeline compares the hangman’s noose with an accountant reckoning the credits and debits of the condemned man’s life. And The Comedy of Errors refers to a debt as a “thousand marks”, a unit only used by book-keepers in Elizabethan England.

Yet Shakespeare seems to have been rather loose with his economics. Rob Eastaway’s new Shakespearean mathematical miscellany, Much Ado About Numbers, tells us that Shakespeare put Dutch guilders in Anatolia in The Comedy of Errors, situated Italian chequins in Phoenicia in Pericles, described Portuguese crusadoes in Venice in Othello and had Julius Caesar’s will bequeathing Greek drachmas to every Roman. There is something to be learnt from Shakespeare’s attitude to numbers (besides that he’s a poor guide to foreign exchange markets).

As Eastaway explains, Shakespeare’s works are richly adorned with numbers. Hamlet’s “thousand natural shocks/ That flesh is heir to” is just one of more than 300 instances of the word “thousand” in Shakespeare’s work. We are not meant to hear Hamlet’s words as a precise count, of course. By “thousand” he refers to the myriad of misfortunes a person can experience in a lifetime. And by “myriad” I mean “a lot”, rather than its original meaning in classical Greek, “ten thousand”. Large numbers have a way of blurring like that, especially as Shakespeare was writing for an audience who would rarely have any literal use for a thousand. Few people would earn a thousand pounds or travel a thousand miles, although the Globe Theatre might have held three thousand paying customers.

In Timon of Athens, Timon tries to borrow “fifty-five hundred talents” from his friend Lucilius. That’s 120 tonnes of silver, Eastaway tells us. No Elizabethan audience would have grasped what fifty-five hundred talents really meant. Nor, without Eastaway doing our homework for us, do we. (It’s more than $100mn.) But we all get the point: it’s a ludicrous request.

We still share Shakespeare’s love for hyperbolic numbers, but we also need to use big numbers accurately. I’m old enough to remember confusion as to the definition of the word “billion”. These days,

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