Just like Dr. Dre, Stephen King, and just about anyone that has created anything of note, it turns out that William Shakespeare loved hitting the good shit before entering the creative zone.
South African Scientists ran forensic tests on 24 pipes found in his hometown of Stratford-Upon-Avon, and concluded that, in the 400-year old fragments, cannabis was found in four that came from Shakespeare’s very own garden. Stoners rejoice — The Bard may have been one of you.
We can see it now — with a Subway sandwich in one hand, and a pipe of Stratford’s dankest haze in the other, the poet and playwright conjured up some of the most famous, thought-provoking lines in the English language. If ‘To be or not to be’ is not the typical pondering of a couch-locked stoner, I don’t know what is.
After researchers connected the dots with Shakespeare’s reference to ‘noted weed’ and ‘compounds strange’ in Sonnet 76, I decided to put my years of university — which mainly consisted of literary analysis and smoking weed — to good use. Picking through The Bard’s lines, I found some further glaring references to his pot-smoking exploits.
1. From Othello:
O thou weed,
Who art so lovely fair and smell’st so sweet
That the sense aches at thee
Turns out that Shakes loved the sweet leaf so much that his senses ached for it. Or he was suffering from chronic back pain and his dealer was dry… obviously writing chairs in those days weren’t so comfortable.
2. From Julius Caesar:
Is Brutus sick? And is it physical
To walk unbracèd and suck up the humors
Of the dank morning?
Ah, reminds me of breakfast in Amsterdam: a syrup soaked waffle, one cup of honeycomb and camomile tea, and a pipe to suck up the humors of the dankest of mornings.
3. From Venus and Adonis:
Who plucks the bud before one leaf put forth?
Yeah dude, who does that? You have to wait until the thing is strong and fully grown before you harvest, bruh.
4. From Sonnet 38:
Be thou the tenth muse, ten times more in worth
Than those old nine which rhymers invocate;
And he that calls on thee, let him bring forth
Eternal numbers to outlive long date.
In Sonnet 76, Shakespeare wrote that he kept ‘invention’ in a noted weed. Sonnet 38 is further confirmation of this ‘tenth muse’ which helped fuel his verses.
5. From Richard iii:
Grandam, one night, as we did sit at supper,
My uncle Rivers talk’d how I did grow
More than my brother: ‘Ay,’ quoth my uncle Gloucester,
‘Small herbs have grace, great weeds do grow apace:’
Who could forget that understated subplot of Richard iii in which one guy grew jealous of the rapid growth of his brother’s plantation. The turf war was relentless, and many an ass was capped in the gloomy night.
I was going to write something witty and revealing to close this, but I smoked too much and forgot what it was. And now I’m all out of bud. Therefore, I’ll leave it up to The Bard to echo my sentiments exactly:
Nature’s soft nurse,
how have I frighted thee,
That thou no more wilt weigh my eyelids down
And steep my senses in forgetfulness?
