The Science of Shakespeare (31 page)

WHAT'S IN A NUMBER?

What is intriguing about these arguments is that, if one removes the speculation about early Elizabethan telescopy, they begin to resemble the kind of “close reading” that has always formed a significant part of Shakespeare criticism; indeed, they echo many of the arguments that Shakespeare scholars have been putting forward for decades (if not centuries). Consider Usher's attention to numbers. At first, his number crunching might seem somewhat obsessive, like that of a Kabbalist—but there's always been a corner of Shakespeare scholarship in which obsession with numbers is de rigueur. A case in point is the work of Thomas McAlindon, a respected Shakespeare scholar who taught at the University of Hull, in England. In
Shakespeare's Tragic Cosmos
(1991), for example, McAlindon explored the “quadruple groupings” in
Julius Caesar
: two marriages; four plebeians responding to the speeches of Brutus and Antony; four plebeians attacking Cinna the poet (“no doubt the same ones”). The number two holds even more significance for McAlindon. The “dyad” crops up frequently in the canon—for example, in
A Midsummer Night's Dream
, where “unified duality is presented as incipient doubleness and confusion.”

McAlindon finds numbers to be even more crucial to interpreting
Macbeth
, a play in which “number symbolism co-operates with nature symbolism in the process of signalling key ideas relating to the tragic theme of disunity and chaos.… Threes and twos, trebling and doubling, are closely linked throughout the play.” This pattern of numbers “focuses sharply on the idea that ‘doubleness' is the root cause of tragic chance and confusion, so that the witches' refrain, ‘Double, double, toil and trouble; / Fire burn, and cauldron bubble' … might be taken as the play's epigraph.” It is the three witches who naturally catch his attention first. (If three is a mystical number to Christians—think of the Holy Trinity—then why would Christians associate the number with witchcraft? McAlindon has the answer: “The explanation, of course, lies in the fact that witchcraft, like devilry, is a rival system which parodies what it seeks to overthrow.”) The porter admits three imaginary sinners into hell; Macbeth hires three murderers. Banquo hallucinates a series of nine kings, but of course nine is “the witches' favourite multiple of three.” (Wait a minute, is it really
nine
kings? The text says “a show of eight kings” with “Banquo following” [4.1.3]—eight plus one; there's your nine.) Duncan is murdered at 3 a.m. (there's a tradition that roosters crow three times—at midnight, at 3 a.m., and an hour before dawn); and the porter admits to “carousing till the second cock” (2.3.23–24).
*
And, of course, three “tomorrow”s in Macbeth's famous soliloquy.

That's a lot of threes (and I haven't listed them all). Were these triads as important to Shakespeare as they are to McAlindon, or is he reading into the plays a subtext that the author never intended? McAlindon insists that these number patterns “tell us something important about Shakespeare's beliefs and motivation.” His findings show that
Macbeth
, for example, is “a far more intricate and artful play than has customarily been thought” and provide us “with firm clues as to its meanings. Its special relevance in this context lies, of course, in the fact that number symbolism is part of the language of cosmology.…”

Another scholar struck by Shakespeare's use of numbers is Shankar Raman at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In a paper titled “Specifying Unknown Things: The Algebra of
The Merchant of Venice
,” he examines Bassanio's and Portia's argument over the status and value of unknown things—a quarrel that “parallels a shift in the history of algebra.” He says that “the language of proportionality and algebraic equations permeates in particular Bassanio and Portia's responses to the ‘hazard' of choosing the right casket.” The play expresses “a fundamental connection between law and mathematics.” In another paper, “Death by Numbers: Counting and Accounting in
The Winter's Tale
,” Raman focuses on a “deep and abiding … connection between the language of Renaissance arithmetic and the (at first glance) unmathematical world of Shakespearean romance.” The most important numbers in the play, he says, are zero and one, with much of the drama rooted in an “overarching tension” between the two: “The difference between the zero and the one in
The Winter's Tale
bespeaks a tension between the two different numbering systems, Arabic and Roman, to which the early modern era is heir,” and offers the playwright a chance to create “dense ruminations on the finititude of existence.”
†

*   *   *

These highly analytic studies
of Shakespeare's use of numbers are certainly intriguing, and no doubt Shakespeare knew what he was doing in his use of numbers
most of the time
. But occasionally he seems to have been downright sloppy. In
Hamlet
, the prince ponders the imminent battle between Norwegian and Polish forces, and the “two thousand souls” (4.4.25) that will likely perish; a few dozen lines later it is “twenty thousand men” who will die (4.4.60).
*
In
Henry V
(1.2), the archbishop of Canterbury rattles off a long list of names and dates in order to justify the English king's claim to France, and Shakespeare—repeating an error in Holinshed's arithmetic—subtracts 426 from 805 and gets 421 (rather than 379). In
Julius Caesar
, Octavius laments Caesar's “three and thirty wounds” (5.1.52), although Plutarch clearly has the number at twenty-three, not thirty-three. In
The Winter's Tale
, both Leontes and the Chorus (“Time”) give the duration of the gap between the third and fourth acts as sixteen years, but Camillo gives it as fifteen (4.2.4). These few examples may not prove that, as Harold Jenkins has put it, Shakespeare “was often lax with numbers”; still, we should perhaps be cautious about attaching a deep significance to every number in the canon.

As we've seen, Usher is not the first to focus on Shakespeare's use of numbers; nor is he the first to look for hidden treasure in the curious words and phrases that one finds throughout the canon. Consider, for example, that peculiar line from
Hamlet
that we looked at earlier, about knowing a hawk from a handsaw. Recall that Usher's explanation involved geography, and in particular the relationship between Elsinore, Tycho Brahe's island of Hven, and the German university city of Wittenberg. It may have sounded like a stretch—but consider this explanation, offered by a nineteenth-century critic. After a reminder that “handsaw” may refer to a kind of bird, we are told that

The meaning generally given to this passage is, that birds generally fly with the wind, and, when the wind is northerly, the sun dazzles the hunter's eye, and he is scarcely able to distinguish one bird from another. If the wind is southerly, the bird flies in that direction, and his back is to the sun, and he can easily know a hawk from a handsaw. When the wind is north-north-west, which occurs about ten o'clock in the morning, the hunter's eye, the bird, and the sun, would be in a direct line, and with the sun thus in his eye he would not at all be able to distinguish a
hawk
from a
handsaw
.

Who could have missed
that
? Still, if “handsaw” means “heron” in
Hamlet
, one might wonder why it appears to straightforwardly mean “handsaw” in
Henry IV, Part 1
. The relevant scene comes in act 2, where Falstaff claims to have been attacked by a horde of bandits. (The number of attackers grows with each telling of the tale, but in reality it was just two men—Prince Hal and his accomplice, Poins, in disguise.) After intentionally damaging his own sword to make it appear as though he had used it to fight off his assailants, Falstaff laments that his weapon is “hacked like a handsaw” (2.4.161). Maybe, just maybe, Hamlet's handsaw was a handsaw all along. As Freud is supposed to have said, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”

WHEN SHALL WE 1,250 MEET AGAIN?

The Shakespeare Association of America is to Shakespeare studies what the American Astronomical Society is to astronomy. The SAA
*
is the world's largest professional association for Shakespeare scholarship and allied studies, boasting some 1,250 members from 36 countries. I had the privilege of sitting in on a number of sessions at their annual conference in 2012, when it was held in Boston, and again in 2013, when it was held in Toronto. The breadth of topics tackled at a typical SAA conference is truly staggering, encompassing not only Shakespeare's writings but also those of Marlowe, Jonson, and any other writers active in early modern England, as well as analyses of the rapidly changing material, social, and intellectual environment in which these writers lived and worked.

Scholars come to present their papers, listen to other scholars' papers, and to discuss research areas of mutual interest. That much it probably has in common with any other arts or humanities conference. But one difference stood out: In each seminar room, some fifteen or twenty chairs are placed around a central table, as in a corporate boardroom; people actually presenting a paper in the session are invited to sit in this “inner circle.” Surrounding them one finds another thirty or forty chairs lined up against the outer perimeter of the room, facing inward. This is where the “auditors” sit—anyone who's not presenting a paper. (These are often graduate students, but they're just as likely to be tenured professors who are attending the session to listen rather than to present.) This arrangement, which one senses hasn't changed in many, many years, is clearly seen as normal by the attendees—but it seems to create an unnecessarily harsh divide between the presenters and the auditors. (The view from the auditors' circle is a bit odd, as one peers at the faces of half of the presenters, and the backs of the heads of the other half. Even when you can see a speaker's face, it is always partially obscured by the back of someone else's head.)

Topics that came up for discussion in 2012 and 2013 ranged from the predictable to the esoteric. A seminar titled “Reading Shakespeare and the Bible” is hardly surprising; in the twenty-first century, neither is “Early Modern Queer Colonial Encounters” or “iShakespeare: New Media in Research and Pedagogy.” For myself, on the lookout for science-related topics, a panel on “‘The Famous Ape': Shakespeare and Primatology” was a highlight of the 2012 conference; so was a seminar on “Matter, Perception, and Cognition in the Renaissance.” (I tried not to worry too much when a seminar leader referred to philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett as “David Dennett”; I suppose anyone can make a one-time slip.) Sometimes what seem like minor things become major discussion topics: The question of how many people have to be able to see a dagger before it should be considered “real”; how sleep deprivation affects Macbeth's cognitive abilities; whether the names of Shakespeare's characters have scatalogical significance, reflecting (as one scholar suggested) “aspects of anality and flatulence.” At the 2013 conference, I was intrigued by a listing for a two-hour session on
The Tempest
, one of my favorite plays. As the seminar unfolded, the presenters pondered questions that likely escaped casual readers of the play. For example: What language, exactly, does Prospero teach to Caliban? Should we think of Caliban and Miranda as grammar-school students, with Miranda the more advanced pupil? And is Caliban
still
a student of Prospero's, or was he expelled for attempting to rape Miranda? And why is Alonso so certain that he will never see his daughter again, just because she's moved from Milan to Tunis—when there was already a centuries-old trade route established between the Italian city and the North African port? Later, someone made a case for interpreting Caliban's log gathering as a symbol for deforestation and environmental destruction. An older gentleman along the outer perimeter of auditors chimed in: “Or at least for log gathering,” he said dryly.

For anyone not up to speed on twenty-first-century Shakespeare scholarship, some of the topics covered may seem to come from somewhere just beyond the left-field wall. Some sample titles from the last two conferences:

1.
  “Diagnosing Hamlet: The mad prince and the autism spectrum.”

2.
  “Dis-Eating
Macbeth
: Macbeth's indigestion and the matter of milk.”

3.
  “The Ecology of
The Tempest
: Was Prospero's island carbon-neutral?”

4.
  “‘Exhalations Whizzing': Meteorology, melancholy, and moral action in
Julius Casear.
”

5.
  “The Georgic Contract: Agrarian bioregionalism and eco-cosmopolitanism in
Henry IV, Part 2.
”

6.
  “Head in the Clouds: Historicism,
Hamlet
, and neurophenomenology.”

7.
  “Shakespeare's Quantum Physics:
The Merry Wives of Windsor
as a feminist ‘parallel universe' of
Henry IV, Part 2.
”

8.
  “The Unbearable Lightness of Being Ariel: Is Prospero's little helper a hologram?”

Okay, I confess: Three of these eight titles are made up. But can you tell the fake titles from the real ones? It's not easy, is it? (The answers can be found at the end of the chapter.)

I mentioned that Usher devotes nine pages to the famous “Exit, pursued by a bear” stage direction in
The Winter's Tale
. Perhaps his interpretation wouldn't have been too wildly out of place at the 2013 conference, where a paper examined “the bear's disruptive (and even desirable) queer effects that destabilize binary systems of difference. Shakespeare's onstage bear—whether live in the flesh or represented by a bearskin (made of bear-that-once-was)—materializes ‘transspecies' connections that refuse the (false) separation between human/animal and nature/culture, preferring inter-actions and inter-dependence to autonomy and antagonism.”