Post by The Tax Returns Are in Kenya on Aug 11, 2015 19:39:44 GMT -5
If you’ve ever read or seen A Midsummer Night’s Dream, you may have wondered if the secret to Shakespeare’s imaginative verse was, well, herbal. And you might be very right! A recent issue of Country Life magazine has renewed interest in a study from 2001, in which scientists in South Africa scoured a handful of 400-year-old pipes from Stratford-upon-Avon and found four pipes from Shakespeare’s garden that contained traces of marijuana, or “the noted weed” as the Sonnets and your kooky aunt in Denver call it. Of 24 pipe fragments that were examined, 8 contained remnants of marijuana and 2 had hints of Peruvian cocaine. In Country Life, writer Mark Griffiths posits that an unidentified man in an etching in The Herball, a 16th-century botanical book, is actually Shakespeare.
Does this mean the Bard was toasted when he wrote some of the English language’s most studied poems and plays? All signs point to: sure, maybe! He certainly wouldn’t be the only poet in the English literature canon to look for out-of-body inspiration, but we’ll leave you with this bleak list of “10 literary figures with crippling drug addictions” to get you in the mood.
Does this mean the Bard was toasted when he wrote some of the English language’s most studied poems and plays? All signs point to: sure, maybe! He certainly wouldn’t be the only poet in the English literature canon to look for out-of-body inspiration, but we’ll leave you with this bleak list of “10 literary figures with crippling drug addictions” to get you in the mood.
