WAS SHAKESPEARE A DOPE-SMOKING COKEHEAD?

Buffs of the Bard of Avon have long believed that he had to have been a stoner to write the way he did. Palaeontologists recently unearthed corroborating evidence, and now want to exhume his remains. The director of the Institute for Human Evolution at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, has formally asked for permission from the (stonily silent) Church of England. Encrustation in two dozen 17th-century clay pipes uncovered in 2001 in the garden of Shakespeare’s home at Stratford-upon-Avon showed signatures of cannabis, cocaine, the masking agent camphor, myristic acid—a hallucinogenic in nutmeg—and quinoline, a coal tar distillate used to make alkaloids and drugs. Not only that, deduced researchers, but Sonnet 76 referred to the “noted weed” and “compounds strange”. This might sound like piffle, but the results were published in the South African Journal of Science. The Bard, though, might have hexed the drama. His tomb reads: “Blese be ey man ty spares thes stones / And curst be he ty moves my bones.”