14 and Shakespeare the Numbers Man - Numberphile

Professor Roger Bowley says poetry and numbers are more closely linked than you may think, citing Shakespeare's 14-line sonnets and iambic pentameter as examples.

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Closed Caption:


ROGER BOWLEY: I think numbers
don't just percolate through
mathematics and physics and
chemistry and the sciences,
but they're in everything
around us.
So poetry is an extreme form of
word play in which numbers
dictate form and structure which
give more beauty to it.
The number is 14.
14 because I want to recite to
you, Brady, a love sonnet
which has 14 lines.
These 14 lines are structured
to come in groups of four,
four, four and two.
And they actually have to go
all the way through in a
particular structure using
what are called iambic
pentameters which means that
they go dah-dah dah-dah
dah-dah dah-dah dah-dah
in each line.
So there's a rhythm of 10 in
each line, which imposes an
enormous constraint on a poet
trying to fit these da-dah
dah-dah dah-dahs into this rigid
structure of 14 lines.
So the one I want to talk about
is "Sonnet 18." "Shall I
compare thee to a
summer's day?
Thou art more lovely
and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the
darling buds of May.
And summer's lease hath
all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of
heaven shines and often is his
gold complexion dimm'd; and
every fair from fair sometime
declines, by chance or nature's
changing course untrimmed.
But they eternal summer shall
not fade nor lose position of
that fair thou ow'st. Nor
shall Death brag thou
wander'st in his shade when in
eternal lines to time thou
grow'st; so long as men can
breathe or eyes can see, so
long lives this and this
gives life to thee."
Shakespeare wrote these poems
in the form of a sonnet.
It's called a Shakespearean
sonnet.
And they were love poems to--
well, I think it was written
either for his patron so that
they could pass it to their
girlfriends, or to his
boyfriends.
Who knows?
The numbers were this
beat of iambic
pentameters, 10 syllables.
And at the end, you
have a rhyme.
So in the first line, you have
"Shall I compare thee to a
summer's day thou art more
lovely and more temperate."
May, date which rhymes
with temperate.
Shines, dimmed, declines,
untrimmed, fade, ow'st, shade,
grow'st, see, thee.
So the last two lines don't
rhyme every other one.
They have to rhyme
with each other.
So this is a summary and a
sudden emphasis through the
rhythm and through the
words of the whole
meaning of the poem.
It's rigidly structured to have
these rhymes all the way
through it, to have these beats
running all the way
through it.
BRADY HARAN: Are the numbers
purely adding straight jacket
to constrain the poet or are the
numbers helping the poet
to add beauty?
ROGER BOWLEY: That's a deep
question which you just
thought up.
And I have no idea which way.
Which comes first, the
chicken or the egg?
I think Shakespeare was so
fluent in all aspects of word
play that he could turn
his hand to anything.
And it was almost as though he
took the old [INAUDIBLE]
version of sonnets, turned it
slightly differently, and
showed he could write 150-odd
of these things at will,
knocking off 10 at a time,
because he was so fluent.
And I don't think the
numbers were a
constraint to him at all.
But to any other poet, modern
poets, they would find it
incredibly difficult.
Shakespeare had an enormous
vocabulary, much bigger than
scholarly people
of these days.
It was as though he had words
from all sorts of
language mixed in.
Now, how somebody from Stratford
could have such a
vocabulary is beyond me.
And it's because of that that
he found such fluency.
We got married in
'72 August 12.
And that's the photo a year
later, and we were in
Stratford on Avon on a
beautiful sunny day.
And my wife was wearing
a flowery dress.
And she looked absolutely
beautiful in front of this
cottage which was Anne
Hathaway's cottage,
Shakespeare's wife.
Now don't think that
Shakespeare wrote
sonnets for his wife.
It's not that sort of romantic
liaison they had.
It was more--
well, he left her for example.
And I've never left my wife
for any length of time.