How to Do Things With Numbers: Love’s Labour’s Lost and Quantitative Uncertainty

Abstract

The unstable relationship between verba and res—words and things—in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost has been widely recognized among its readers and viewers, but often without sufficient context of relevant theoretical discussions actually occurring in the Elizabethan era. This essay proposes that the drama’s obsession with numbering and misnumbering might serve as a fruitful starting place for interrogating its linguistic experimentalism. After all, while sixteenth-century arithmetic manuals introduced new semiotic discussions about the referentiality of numbers, a prominent strand of Elizabethan poetic controversy revolved around how metrical numbers become meaningful within English-language verse. In particular, arguments between the classical and native-language traditions often concerned whether poetic “number” was merely an abstract tool for counting syllables (arithmos) or whether it contributed to the proportionality of the language being used (rithmos). Shakespeare’s play indirectly examines the theoretical stakes of this controversy—especially involving the referentiality of language—by continually linking the characters’ own creation of poetry to their comic confusion about how to “do things” with numbers. [B.S.]