A Stoned Shakespeare?

Some years ago, the media announced the research findings of Merwe and Thackeray concerning
William Shakespeare’s alleged consumption of marihuana. According to a Brazilian newspaper
(Folha de São Paulo), the investigators first suspected the bard was a drug addict when they found
references to marihuana in his Sonnet #76. Merwe and Thackeray point to the expression "noted
weed", and believe the weed must be tobacco prepared from Cannabis sativa - or marihuana as
most people would call it. However, the convenience of arguing that something is written in
Shakespeare or in the Bible lies in that nobody actually looks it up or asks for a complete quote with
references to the original. Let us proceed differently this time: Let us have a look at Sonnet #76.

Why is my verse so barren of new pride?

So far from variation or quick change?
Why, with the time, do I not glance aside
To new-found methods and to compounds strange?
Why write I still all one, ever the same,
And keep invention in a noted weed,
That every word doth almost tell my name,
Showing their birth, and where they did proceed?
O know, sweet love, I always write of you,
And you and love are still my argument;
So all my best is dressing old words new,
Spending again what is already spent;
For as the Sun is daily new and old,
So is my love still telling what is told

Needless to say, Sonnet #76 tells us that Shakespeare, who is not vain or concerned with notoriety,
prefers to repeat the old truths about love, rather than take up novel writing methods and fads. Just
as the Sun which rises in the morning is the selfsame Sun which set the night before, so the love
Shakespeare bespeaks is the same old love which we have heard of from the wise since the world
began. The general meaning is quite clear, I think (though the sonnet may contain many yet finer
shades of meaning).

But where did Merwe and Thackeray get the idea that Shakespeare was praising the effects of
marihuana smoking upon his creative genius? Let us look up the word "weed" in the dictionary:
Apart from the meanings of the word in modern English, in the early seventeenth century "weed"
used to mean "garment" or "clothing" (see the second entry for the word in Webster’s Encyclopedic
Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language (page 1618). And let us also have a look at what
the scholar Alexander Schmidt says in his seminal Shakespeare Lexicon and Quotation Dictionary
(published in 1902): The word "weed" was used throughout Shakespeare’s work, without exception,
as a noun with the meaning "garment" (page 1347). Line 6 from Sonnet #76 is given as an example
under the entry. So the slang expression "weed", meaning "marihuana", created―I
believe―sometime in the 20th century, could not have been in use at Shakespeare’s time, that is,
before 1616.
Lines 11 and 12 of Sonnet #76 make the idea of garment perfectly clear: Shakespeare is talking
about dressing old truths in new words. Marihuana? Yes, in and out of Merwe’s and Thackeray’s
lungs.

But didn’t the media say something about pipes? Technical analyses carried out by the South
African Police Department show evidence of marihuana and cocaine residues in pipes supplied by a
Stratford-on-Avon-based museum. But says Thackeray: "We are not saying the pipes actually
belonged to Shakespeare [...] some of them came from the area where he lived" (quoted from Folha
de São Paulo). Given Merwe and Thackeray’s initial suspicion (based as it was on sheer ignorance,
or possibly on something worse than ignorance), what are we to think of the curious coincidence of
finding marihuana residues in pipes whose first owners back in the seventeenth century remain
unknown to us? What are we to think of a “study” which suggests cocaine and marihuana addiction
to be apparently commonplace in 1616? What to think of the media and of the scientific community
which, it seems, lend support to such hypotheses without at least looking up a word or two in the
dictionary?

Merwe and Thackeray drew the conclusion that "Shakespeare may have used marihuana as a
source of inspiration" (quote from Folha de São Paulo). If the hypothesis of the bard extolling the
effects of hashish (which I believe I have refuted sufficiently) were valid, why didn’t they draw the
opposite conclusion? Any honest researcher would have marveled at the fact that Shakespeare―in
Merwe and Thackeray’s twisted view of things a drug addict―managed to write a number of works
of extraordinary richness and perennial values, just as Beethoven, who could barely hear, managed
to compose some of the world’s best symphonies.

Merwe and Thackeray’s “study” was published in the South African Journal of Science.