There’s a principle that Shakespeare was an accountant. How else to clarify the detailed use of bookkeeping metaphors in his writing? “We will not spend a big expense of time/ Earlier than we reckon together with your a number of 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 credit and debits of the condemned man’s life. And The Comedy of Errors refers to a debt as a “thousand marks”, a unit solely utilized by book-keepers in Elizabethan England.
But Shakespeare appears to have been quite free along with his economics. Rob Eastaway’s new Shakespearean mathematical miscellany, A lot Ado About Numbers, tells us that Shakespeare put Dutch guilders in Anatolia in The Comedy of Errors, located Italian chequins in Phoenicia in Pericles, described Portuguese crusadoes in Venice in Othello and had Julius Caesar’s will bequeathing Greek drachmas to each Roman. There’s something to be learnt from Shakespeare’s angle to numbers (moreover that he’s a poor information to overseas alternate markets).
As Eastaway explains, Shakespeare’s works are richly adorned with numbers. Hamlet’s “thousand pure shocks/ That flesh is inheritor to” is only one of greater than 300 cases of the phrase “thousand” in Shakespeare’s work. We’re not meant to listen to Hamlet’s phrases as a exact depend, after all. By “thousand” he refers back to the myriad of misfortunes an individual can expertise in a lifetime. And by “myriad” I imply “so much”, quite than its unique that means in classical Greek, “ten thousand”. Giant numbers have a means of blurring like that, particularly as Shakespeare was writing for an viewers who would not often have any literal use for a thousand. Few individuals would earn a thousand kilos or journey a thousand miles, though the Globe Theatre may need held three thousand paying prospects.
In Timon of Athens, Timon tries to borrow “fifty-five hundred abilities” from his pal Lucilius. That’s 120 tonnes of silver, Eastaway tells us. No Elizabethan viewers would have grasped what fifty-five hundred abilities actually meant. Nor, with out Eastaway doing our homework for us, can we. (It’s greater than $100mn.) However all of us get the purpose: it’s a daft request.
We nonetheless share Shakespeare’s love for hyperbolic numbers, however we additionally want to make use of massive numbers precisely. I’m sufficiently old to recollect confusion as to the definition of the phrase “billion”. Lately, it means a thousand million however, in varied occasions and locations, it has meant 1,000,000 million. Metropolis of London merchants used to make use of “yard”, brief for the French milliard, to check with a thousand million. That was helpful. Each yard and milliard sound fairly totally different from million on a crackly telephone line. Billion doesn’t.
Crackly telephone line or not, it’s common for thousands and thousands and billions to be confused. Too usually we lump them into the identical psychological class: massive numbers. However there’s massive, and there’s massive. 1,000,000 seconds is lower than 12 days, whereas a billion seconds is almost 32 years.
The confusion is repeatedly exploited by politicians. No UK Price range speech is full and not using a loud boast that the federal government is spending a couple of million kilos on some worthy scheme, whereas the grinding progress of inflation will silently squash budgets by billions in actual phrases. The quiet billions are actual cash, whereas the noisy thousands and thousands are a rounding error. To the unsuspecting voter, they sound a lot the identical.
We may help ourselves to navigate the maze of numbers and language by making useful comparisons. Essentially the most simple is to determine what that multibillion-pound tax improve really means per particular person. It’s at all times helpful to check spending this yr with spending final yr, or a decade in the past, or with spending in a neighbouring nation. Evaluating the unfamiliar with the acquainted attracts that means out of a bewildering panorama of billions and trillions.
Once we merely want to convey a poetic sense of scale, as Shakespeare usually did, now we have entry to a linguistic expertise the Bard didn’t possess: phrases comparable to “squillion” or “jillion” or “zillion”. These, my buddies, are the indefinite hyperbolic numerals. In accordance with Helen Zaltzman’s The Allusionist podcast, such phrases emerged within the US within the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Jillion was frequent in Texas. Zillion was a staple of Harlem’s African-American literary magazines. Within the late Thirties, the author Damon Runyon introduced each phrases to a wider viewers. The enjoyment of the jillion — or, should you actually wish to punch it up, the bajillion — is that whereas it might be imprecise, it’s clear. The phrase means “an enormous quantity, however let’s not fuss about precisely how enormous”.
Each time Shakespeare used giant numbers, it was clear sufficient that he was talking figuratively. Eastaway paperwork “twenty thousand kisses” in Henry VI, Half 2. Hamlet’s love for Ophelia is greater than that of “forty thousand brothers”. In A Midsummer Night time’s Dream, Cupid’s arrow pierces “100 thousand hearts”. And Shakespeare’s greatest variety of all? Friar Laurence assures Romeo that if he escapes to Mantua, when he returns he shall be greeted with “twenty hundred thousand occasions extra pleasure”. That’s two million.
Alas, that’s not how the story ends – a reminder that numbers, irrespective of how hyperbolic or how exact, needn’t essentially inform us the reality.
Written for and first printed within the Monetary Occasions on 31 Might 2024.
Loyal readers may benefit from the guide that began all of it, The Undercover Economist.
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