inheritance

Abstract

In this brief section, I connect the New Shakspere Society’s interest in statistics to Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, wherein the computer Deep Thought calculates the “Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.” The answer is 42. As Deep Thought explains, the answer is incomprehensible because the beings didn't know what they were asking, or as James Shapiro puts it in his recent book Contested Will, the problem with cyphered approaches to Shakespeare (and by that he means only Baconians and Oxfordians and the like; he makes only passing mention of stylometricians) is that the very approach (the meaning of life through math) “diminishes the very thing that makes him [Shakespeare] so exceptional: his imagination.”

Our patterns of understanding, whether scientific or imaginative, no matter how elegantly and finely wrought, do not respond to every question or record our every insight. It’s not merely that we might one day light upon the answer to a question, it’s rather whether the question is worthy of no more than passing consideration. Some questions demand our attention – how do we cure cancer or save the planet. But 42 is not the answer to everything. In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the witches invoke their own mathematics: “Seven times nine times nine shall he dwindle peak and pine.” That math adds up to 567. The sequence suggests some formal logic, but to advocate that the solution to Macbeth is digital rather than dramatical—that there is one answer rather than endless questions—is to cut the tragic heart out of the human condition. Today, the very technologies that seem to cater to our imaginative capacities (and our sense of self-importance) are designed by companies and regulated by governments hell-bent on proving that we are predictable and, thus, marketable and governable. In an age in which we are constantly monitored by our computer browsers, our credit card companies, even our mobile phones, Fleay’s once-anomalous statistical profiling of Shakespeare now seems rather modest amid the prevalent technologies that track us from sunrise to the sea.