Much Ado About Numbers: A Conversation With Rob Eastaway

**Philip Rowe** (0:09)
Welcome to the History Of European Theatre podcast, and thanks for joining me on this journey through millennia of theatrical history. Episode 214, Much Ado About Numbers, a conversation with Rob Eastaway.
For today's guest episode, I was pleased to get a chance to talk to Rob Eastaway, author of a book all about Shakespeare and his relationship to numbers and mathematics. Rob's book, Much Ado About Numbers, is a very entertaining read, whatever your level of understanding of maths might be, and quite an eye-opener when considering how much maths permeates into Shakespeare's plays. This is not just about hard numbers and number crunching, but touches on the Elizabethan attitude towards descriptive scales, astrology, astronomy, music and optics, among many other things.
Rob does a great job in the book of condensing these very broad and often technical subjects into a book that is a mixture of popular science, mathematics, history and, of course, literature. So it was great to get to chat to Rob about just some of these concepts.
Rob Eastaway is author of several best-selling books connecting maths with everyday life, including Why Do Buses Come in Threes? and How Many Socks Make a Pair. His first book, What is a Googly? An Introduction to Cricket, was famously presented by British Prime Minister John Major to President Bush Senior at Camp David in 1992 and was published in the US under the title Cricket Explained. With Mike Askew, he wrote Maths for Mums & Dads, a book that helps parents to understand the new methods being used to teach maths and offers ideas on how to make maths more engaging and fun at home. An American edition was published in 2010 entitled Old Dogs, New Math. Rob appears regularly on radio in the UK and is a regular speaker, an activity that has taken him to the USA and Australia. He was president of the Mathematical Association from 2007 to 2008 I spoke to Rob over a Zoom call from his home in London. You point out that thinking about Shakespeare and mathematics might not be an obvious pursuit when it comes to Shakespeare studies, but then you go on to show that it is a subject of its own right, that as a feature of everyday life, mathematics was really coming into its own in the early modern period. Now, we know quite a lot about the level of study of Latin and ancient literature in Elizabethan and Jacobean schools, but what do you think that the maths education looked like?

**Rob Eastaway** (2:47)
I think maths education in the 16th century would have been minimal for the vast majority of people. The chances are up to the age of about seven, and you would have probably learned your numerals, like learning to write letters and learn to write numbers.
I don't know what sort of proportion, but if you were in any sort of trade, you might well have been expected to just learn numerals as part of your early childhood. But then school was a rarity. There would be grammar schools. Shakespeare went to a grammar school, but he went because he was a boy, and his dad could afford for him to go, i.e. he wasn't needed full time working at home. I think education would have been free. But the school timetable is, to see examples of it, it's just wall-to-wall Latin, and it's all oral, and it's just repeating, listening, being tested. What's striking is that there is no mathematics, there's no French, there's no history other than what's in the classics. So, it's very unlike a modern curriculum.
And, you know, it seems like there would have been a little bit of arithmetic if your teacher was up for it. Might, I mean, the idea of pen and paper, and writing down calculations and so on, I don't think that was really a thing in school at all. So, perhaps you would listen to some techniques being described. I don't think you'd hear any geometry. So it would be very arithmetical up till the age of 14, which is when most people's education finished.

**Philip Rowe** (4:35)
Yes.

**Rob Eastaway** (4:35)
There is then what happened at university. And again, university is Oxford and Cambridge. And there was some element of mathematical education. But again, there wasn't a maths degree. You do it as part of the liberal arts. And it would be four things. It would be, forget everything we think about maths today, because the overlap is quite small. But there would be arithmetic and they're beginning to learn the Indo-Arabic numerals and the new methods of doing arithmetic, rather than using an abacus. They're learning geometry, classic geometry, astronomy. And then the fourth subject is music, which Shakespeare definitely regards as being a mathematical subject. But again, largely oral, not sitting down and doing lots of practice tests and stuff.