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Shakespeare a Pothead?

06/28/11-by Bridgette P. LaVictoire
To be or not to be… taH pagh taHbe’… There are more than a number of translations of Shakespeare’s works, and certainly more than enough controversy surrounding him over the centuries after his death, but whether or not Shakespeare was a stoner?

Ok, South African anthropologist Francis Thackery would like to exhume Shakespeare, or at least drill a hole into his coffin and find out if the Bard smoked weed. What Thackery needs is some of his hair or fingernails or toenails in order to find out if there is anything left with regards to any traces of him having smoked marijuana.

Thackery, according to the Huffington Post, is the leading academe on theories of Shakespeare’s drug use. Thackery, the director of the Institute for Human Evolution at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, did “find marijuana residue in pipe fragments found in Shakespeare’s guarden.”

The Huffington Post reported:

Time points out that marijuana was grown in England at the time and was used to make textiles and rope. Plus experts have wondered about the connections to cannabis in the Bard’s work, like a mention of a “noted weed” and “a journey in his head,” lines that appear in two different sonnets.

Of course, right now, we’re not even sure if the man we think is Shakespeare is, well, Shakespeare. It is unclear if Thackery will get approval in order to access the tomb, which is inside a church in Stratford upon Avon. He would also like to run DNA tests on relatives of Shakespeare.

There are other problems with this depending upon what Shakespeare was buried in. If he is in the earth but buried under stone, there may not be any remains left at all, and even if he was not, it is still possible that there is little or nothing left in his tomb. This is England, a land very unkind to human remains.