WILLIAM Shakespeare – or at least his contemporaries – were doing cocaine, dabbling with dagga and experimenting with a range of drugs that would impress even the most desperate of junkies.
These are the findings of the police forensic science laboratory in Pretoria, which conducted chemical analysis of several English 17th-century clay smoking pipes that included specimens found on the site of Shakespeare?s home in Stratford-upon-Avon.
The 24 pipes contained traces of tobacco, suggestive evidence of cannabis and, most surprising, two of the pipes sampled showed signs of cocaine.
?I was most surprised with the findings. I thought that we would find tobacco and possibly cannabis,? says Dr Francis Thackeray, a palaeontologist at the Transvaal Museum.
?Our findings wouldn?t stand up in a court of law if it was a criminal case, but for research purposes we can say that there was cannabis smoked in those pipes,? says Inspector Tommy van der Merwe of the police?s forensic science laboratory.
Unfortunately, cannabis is known to degrade after a short period of time and can be affected by heat.
However, there was no doubt about the traces of cocaine.
?The pipes that showed signs of cocaine still had dirt and sediment in them that preserved the residue inside the pipe. It meant that there was unlikely to be have been any contamination and the readings we got were the same as if we had analysed a crack pipe,? says Van der Merwe.
One of the cocaine pipes came from Harvard House in Stratford-upon-Avon, the home of the mother of John Harvard, after whom Harvard University is named.
Thackeray?s suspicions that the Bard was perhaps getting goofed on grass arose when he came across a reference to the ?noted weed? in his Sonnet 76.
To substantiate his theory he enlisted the help of Professor Nikolaas van der Merwe of Harvard University and contacted the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon, which made available 24 pipe fragments for chemical analysis.
A number of these pipes had been excavated from Shakespeare?s home, New Place, and several showed traces of cannabis.
In further interpreting Sonnet 76, Thackeray has come to the conclusion that the Bard perhaps preferred cannabis and was averse to the use of stronger, more dangerous drugs that he refers to in the poem as ?strange compounds?.