Shakespeare and Mathematics
Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited
Release Date: 01/27/2026
The Shakespeare Ladies Club
Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited
A century after Shakespeare’s death, his words were in danger of being forgotten. While plays like King Lear and Othello still played to packed houses across England, audiences saw only the bowdlerized versions—censored, rewritten, and stripped of anything that could be considered distasteful. How, then, did Shakespeare’s original works re-emerge? Thank the Shakespeare Ladies Club, a group of influential women who rescued his reputation(and his double entendres) from obscurity. In their book, The Shakespeare Ladies Club: The Forgotten Women Who Saved the Bawdy Bard, Christine and...
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The Translator's Art and Shakespeare, with Daniel Hahn
Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited
Is Shakespeare still Shakespeare even if every word is changed? While Shakespeare’s work is often hailed for its universality, its meter, metaphor, and wordplay pose special challenges for translators. How do you convey the rhythm and spirit of Shakespeare’s words in a language that follows fundamentally different rules? Author and translator Daniel Hahn explores these questions in his book, . He interviews translators from around the world, providing unique perspectives on Shakespeare’s language and impact. Some of Shakespeare’s best-known lines can prove the most difficult to...
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The Improvised Shakespeare Company
Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited
What is it like to create a Shakespeare play that’s never been written—and will never be performed again? The Improvised Shakespeare Company is a long-running ensemble that performs entirely unscripted plays in the style of Shakespeare. Founded in Chicago in 2005, the company has spent two decades building a devoted following through performances in the United States and internationally. In this episode, Blaine Swen, the company’s founder, and Ross Bryant discuss how their performances take shape in real time, beginning with a single audience-suggested title and unfolding into a...
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Adjoa Andoh on Shakespeare
Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited
Known to many as Lady Danbury in Netflix’s Bridgerton, Adjoa Andoh, MBE, is also a celebrated Shakespearean actor and director. Across her career, Andoh has returned to Shakespeare not as a fixed canon, but as a space for reimagining power, identity, and belonging. Her landmark Richard II at Shakespeare’s Globe, created with the UK’s first all-women-of-color company, reexamined ideas of nationhood and empire following Brexit, asking who gets to claim the story of England and how those stories are constructed. In this episode, Andoh reflects on Shakespeare as a profoundly...
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Thinking Through Shakespeare, with David Womersley
Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited
Many readers turn to Shakespeare for the beauty of his language or the power of his stories. But in Thinking Through Shakespeare, Oxford scholar David Womersley suggests that the plays offer something else as well: a way of exploring some of the deepest questions about human life. Womersley looks at tragedies like Othello, Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear to show how Shakespeare places audiences inside difficult moral and philosophical problems. The plays raise questions about identity, power, and the tension between doing what is right and doing what is personally advantageous. Rather than...
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The Boydell Shakespeare Gallery
Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited
When you visit a new city, one of your first stops might be a museum. It turns out that public art galleries are largely an 18th-century invention. In London in 1789, publisher John Boydell helped shape that new cultural experience with an ambitious project in Pall Mall: a gallery devoted entirely to scenes from Shakespeare. Boydell commissioned leading British artists to paint pivotal moments from the plays, then sold engraved reproductions for museum-goers to take home with them. The Gallery quickly became a sensation and was visited by everyone who was anyone, from Jane Austen to the Prince...
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Whitney White and Shakespeare
Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited
Whitney White is a theatrical powerhouse. A director, writer, actor, and musician, White’s work has been seen on Broadway, Off Broadway, and at major institutions including The Public Theater, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and, most recently, the Royal Shakespeare Company. Her projects include Jaja’s African Hair Braiding, The Last Five Years, Macbeth in Stride, and By The Queen, which was featured in the Folger’s 2025 Reading Room Festival. In this episode, White discusses , her four-play musical cycle created for the RSC, where it’s now receiving its world...
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Shakespeare and Mathematics
Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited
Many Shakespeare fans don’t think of themselves as “math people.” They’re theater kids, poetry lovers, bookworms, right? But in Shakespeare’s world, math and literature were deeply intertwined. In Much Ado About Numbers: Shakespeare’s Mathematical Life and Times, mathematician Rob Eastaway explores how mathematical thinking shaped Shakespeare’s language and imagination. Shakespeare lived at a moment of major intellectual change, when England was newly encountering Indo-Arabic numerals, experimenting with new systems of calculation, and redefining ideas of measure and...
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The Strange History of Samuel Pepys's Diary
Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited
Why does Samuel Pepys’s diary still matter 200 years after it was first published? In her new book, The Strange History of Samuel Pepys’s Diary, historian Kate Loveman examines how Pepys’s extraordinary consistency as a diarist has made his writing one of the richest records of everyday life in Restoration England. Writing almost daily for nearly a decade, Pepys’s diary documents everything from politics and scientific discoveries to theater and fashion. Even in times of crisis, Pepys reveals life’s ordinary concerns, from worrying about the source of hair for wigs during the Great...
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Celebrating Elizabethan Cooking, with Sam Bilton
Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited
What did people really eat in Shakespeare’s England? In her new book, Much Ado About Cooking, food historian Sam Bilton uncovers the vibrant and surprising world of early modern cuisine—where sugar was locked away like treasure, fresh salads were everyday fare, and a “banquet” meant a “post-feast after party” dessert course. Bilton brings to life the flavors behind Shakespeare’s food references: mince pies, herb-packed green sauces, saffron-brightened tarts, and even whimsical dishes crafted to look like something else entirely. These foods reveal a world shaped by global trade,...
info_outlineMany Shakespeare fans don’t think of themselves as “math people.” They’re theater kids, poetry lovers, bookworms, right? But in Shakespeare’s world, math and literature were deeply intertwined. In Much Ado About Numbers: Shakespeare’s Mathematical Life and Times, mathematician Rob Eastaway explores how mathematical thinking shaped Shakespeare’s language and imagination.
Shakespeare lived at a moment of major intellectual change, when England was newly encountering Indo-Arabic numerals, experimenting with new systems of calculation, and redefining ideas of measure and proportion. Eastaway shows how Shakespeare delighted in numbers and patterns, playing with “scores,” fractions, and symmetry in works like Othello, Henry V, Romeo and Juliet, and The Winter’s Tale. Even familiar references to “nothing,” time, and music take on new meaning when viewed through a mathematical lens.
In this episode, Eastaway reveals how math was woven into everyday life in Shakespeare’s time and how reading with our “math glasses” on can offer fresh insights into Shakespeare’s language.
From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published January 27, 2025. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved.
This episode was produced by Matt Frassica, with Garland Scott serving as executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. Technical support was provided by London Broadcast Studio and Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Web production was handled by Paola García Acuña. Transcripts are edited by Leonor Fernandez. Final mixing services were provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.
Rob Eastaway has authored and coauthored several bestselling books that connect math with everyday life, including Why Do Buses Come in Threes? and How Many Socks Make a Pair? He is the director of Maths Inspiration, an interactive lecture program that has reached over 250,000 teenagers in the United Kingdom, New York, and Sydney. In 2017, he received the Zeeman Medal for excellence in the public communication of mathematics, and in 2025, he delivered the BSHM Gresham College Lecture on the subject of Shakespeare and mathematics. He lives in London.