Jeff Deeney, Huffington Post

April  23, 2014

How high was Shakespeare? Research published in 2001 revealed residues of cocaine, marijuana and myristic acid, a nutmeg-derived hallucinogen, in 17th-century clay-pipe fragments dug up from the garden of his home. Of course, we won’t let the fact that only circumstantial evidence links these pipes with Shakespeare get in the way of some good speculating.

Francis Thackeray, the anthropologist behind that analysis, applied in 2011 to exhume Shakespeare’s skeleton to try to determine whether he was indeed a pothead, as well as his cause of death. The teeth could have been telling: “If we find grooves between the canine and the incisor, that will tell us if he was chewing on a pipe as well as smoking,” said Thackeray. The Church of England has yet to grant permission.

And could that cause of death have been alcohol-related? John Ward, a vicar at the church where Shakespeare is buried, tantalizingly wrote, “Shakespeare, [poet Michael] Drayton and Ben Jonson had a merry meeting and it seems drank too hard, for Shakespeare died of a fever there contracted.” But Ward’s diary entry was made 50 years after the event.

Shakespeare’s drunks alone could stock a tavern, including Sir Toby Belch of the “cakes and ale” party in Twelfth Night, and Falstaff, who appears–wasted–in three different plays and declares in Henry IV Part 2, “If I had a thousand sons, the first humane principle I would teach them should be, to forswear thin potations and to addict themselves to sack [fortified wine].” […continued]

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