Did Shakespeare Use Cannabis?

[dropcap class=”kp-dropcap”]I[/dropcap]t’s long been speculated that WilliamShakespeare might have been baked when writing some of his classics, but did the Bard really smoke cannabis before, during, or after his bouts of creativity?

According to USA Today a study in the South African Journal of Science published in 2001 claims that analysis of some of the pipes from Shakespeare’s garden at Stratford-upon-Avon contained trace amounts of cannabis. They also found trace amounts of cocoa leaves. However, the report makes it a point to emphasize that this does not absolutely prove that the pieces definitely belonged to Shakespeare, or that he smoked.

However, scholars are now finding evidence in old texts that support the idea of Shakespeare using cannabis. Professor Francis Thackeray, a scholar at the Evolutionary Studies Institute at University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, believes Sonnet 76, which makes reference to “invention in a noted weed,” could be referring to cannabis.

“I think that Shakespeare was playing with words and [it] is probably a cryptic reference to cannabis,” he stated. He believes that like other writers, Shakespeare could have been inspired by the mental stimulation that cannabis provides.

He also points out that if the Bard were a smoker, he would have had to hide it. “Writers who were explicit about Cannabis could have their books burnt,” he pointed out, citing the fact that the church was heavily against cannabis.

There’s also solid botanical evidence to back up these ideas. John Gerard, who wrote a 1597 botanical encyclopedia, named a bunch of different types of herbal tobacco as smoked herbs, and there is pretty good standing evidence that cocoa leaves were smoked for their stimulating properties. Based on that, it doesn’t seem super far-fetched that notable poets at the time, such as Shakespeare himself, were also trying cannabis.