What, keep a week away? seven days and nights?
Eight score eight hours? and lovers’ absent hours,
More tedious than the dial eight score times?
– William Shakespeare
Othello, Act 3, Scene 4. Cassio’s mistress Bianca has to work really hard to get his attention. She has been counting the hours since he last saw her – one full week, or 168 hours in total. In a metaphor she compares the time that lovers are absent as passing 160 times more slowly than normal – so to her it feels like she hasn’t seen Cassio for 26,880 hours. Bianca has an obsessive love for Cassio, but from his neglect of her it is a love that appears not to be reciprocated.