Much ado about numbers

Benjamin Franklin once declared there are only two certainties in life - 'death and taxes'.

For most people in the UK and many other countries, there are similarly two unavoidable topics at school: Shakespeare and maths.

But in what ways do the two overlap? What was the maths in and around Shakespeare's life and work?In this fascinating new take on the world of Shakespeare, find out how Tudors multiplied, why Shakespeare never ended a line with the word Orange, why King Lear was every inch a king, and why early drafts of the plays could possibly have been written with a pencil.Shakespeare's world was one in which one might expect to travel no more than a league in an hour, and fathoms and furlongs were as much a part of the language as feet and yards. It was hard to conceive of anything shorter than a minute and the rainbow probably had just five colours.

With historical asides about games, optics, astronomy and music thrown in, you might never think about maths or Shakespeare the same way again.