Will Waccy Baccy…

Weary with toil I haste me to my bed,

The dear repose for limbs with travel tired;
But then begins a journey in my head,
To work my mind when body’s work’s expired.

Sonnet 27

So it seems that recent analysis of pipes discovered in the garden of William Shakespeare’s house reveal that they once held cannabis. Yes, it looks like the bard may have been high on weed when he wrote his plays.

Well, his works certainly don’t lack insight and as many writers - Baudelaire, Cocteau, Aldous Huxley, Jack Kerouac, Robert Louis Stevenson and even Stephen King - know insight often comes with substance abuse.

Twenty-four pipe fragments were analysed and some contained traces of cannabis, two of the pipes contained traces of cocaine and other pipes were laced with tobacco, camphor, and hallucinogenic nutmeg extracts. It must have been wild and whacky back there in the late 1500’s with its ‘noted weed’ and ‘compounds strange’. Who knows if without a little herb, dope, ganga, grass in his system Will (Wacky Baccy) Shakespeare would have ever imagined ‘A Midsummer’s Night Dream’ or ‘The Tempest’.