7 Fun Facts
Here are seven things you probably didn’t know about Shakespeare and his link with numbers and the science of his time. Why seven? It’s a number that was important to Shakespeare and to Elizabethan culture more widely (the seven ages of man, seven deadly sins, seven days of the week and so much more).
1
The biggest number in Shakespeare is 2 million.
Shakespeare loved to exaggerate with big numbers. He uses the word ‘thousand’ over 300 times in his plays. But the biggest number in his plays is in Romeo and Juliet, where the friar tells Romeo that he will be ‘twenty hundred thousand’ (i.e. two million) times more joyful when he returns from exile.
3
Shakespeare’s favourite alternative to the word two was ‘twain’.
Like all writers, Shakespeare liked to have different ways to express numbers. He used the word two a lot (including in the title of one of his plays), but he’d use other expressions such as ‘a pair’ and ‘a couple’. But his favourite alternative was ‘twain’, which he used nearly 50 times. Centuries later, the American writer Samuel Clemens heard a boatman logging the two fathom depth of the water with a shout of ‘mark twain’. Clemens decided to use that as his pen name.
5
Shakespeare was a left-wing writer – literally!
Shakespeare mainly wrote with a quill, which would have come from a goose feather. We know he was right-handed. Goose feathers have curved stems, and those from the bird’s right wing curve in towards the left and hence in towards the writer’s nose. Shakespeare would have preferred a feather that bent away from his nose, which would have come from the goose’s left wing.
7
Shakespeare might have started the whole “6-7” meme.
Six-seven isn’t a new thing. The phrase being “at sixes and sevens” meaning everything is in chaos probably comes from Shakespeare’s Richard II. The quotation is: “All is uneven, and every thing is left at six and seven.”
2
Shakespeare might have used a pencil, but was it 2B or not 2B?
Shakespeare was born in 1564, the same year as Elizabeth I established the Companies of Mines Royal to look for minerals in England’s Lake District. One valuable mineral they found was graphite, which would become the basis of the pencil industry. ‘Black lead’ was known in Shakespeare’s London, so he probably encountered it. But since it was pure graphite, Shakespeare’s pencil would have been 9B, not 2B.
4
Shakespeare first popularised orange as the name of a colour.
In the 14th century, Geoffrey Chaucer had no word for the colour ‘betwixt yellow and red’. In Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare talks about ‘orange tawny’ as a colour. Tawny is a type of brown, and orange was one of those new citrus fruits you could get in a Tudor market. 100 years later, Isaac Newton established orange one of the seven rainbow colours.
6
Shakespeare probably got the character names Rosencrantz and Guildenstern from the astronomer Tycho Brahe.
Tycho Brahe was the Danish astronomer whose accurate astronomical measurements would lead to Kepler and Galileo understanding the true nature of the heavens. Copies of Brahe’s portrait were known to have been circulating in London, so Shakespeare might well have seen the names of Brahe’s ancestors that were inscribed around the outside. Two of those ancestors were Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.