Maybe I’m confused about the current state of things, but I thought we weren’t 100% sure Will Shakespeare was even a real guy, or a single guy, but now we’re testing residue off the inside of a clay pipe we know was his and attributing plays to that?
Suddenly a lot of those metaphors make a lot more sense 😭
I really hate the sentiment that you must be under the influence of something to reach a certain level of creativity. Some artists have found success with this and that’s fine, but it is not a requirement. Not even for the most surreal and otherworldly art.
Also there are other ways to poke that side of brain. Most of the good abstract art I write was under sleep derivation.
Then again, I mainly write code, but it was still up to interpretation what that snippet is supposed to do.
I write my best when I’m depressed. I’m okay with finding alternative routes for that, though weed isn’t one of them. I find weed helps me when I’m doing visual art, but when writing? Weed practically renders me incapable.
I now understand why writers’ usual substances of choice are alcohol and caffeine.
also shakespeare is incredibly specific. the example I like to use is the famous
“Friends, Romans, Countrymen, Lend me your ears!”
Which takes place in a crowded marketplace.
Count the syllables: 1 (friends), 2, (romans), 3 (countrymen), 4 (lend me your ears)
it’s a line in which the meter matches the intent - attracting attention in a big group.
Bill will also often add an eleventh unstressed syllable to his dialogue lines if he wants a character to seem vulnerable or weak, indicating they have fallen off meter because of their inner thoughts
very occasionally he does an eleventh STRESSED syllable when a character is being especially dominating and murderous.
The other famous examples is when a peasant or very low status character speaks, it won’t be in verse at all, but plain prose.
dammit i’m low on coffee and i’m thinking Bill? Bill who? Watterson? Why are we talking calvin and hobbes?
i’m going to go put a sticky note on my screen that says SHAKESBEEF and make some coffee brb
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This is wrong. You cannot imagine what you cannot imagine. Psychedelics definitely allow you to imagine what you previously could not.
Hemp was very common back then for many uses. Cannabis does not automatically mean THC.
It does mean that though, even low potency stuff like the plants they grow specifically to make rope still have varying levels of cannabinoids in them including THC, also that’s literally the only reason to bother smoking it, might as well pack a bowl with hay otherwise
Well, in the context of a clay pipe, the evidence suggest mary Jane, not hemp cloth.
Ohhh pipe not plumbing pipe
Ignoramus here: what’s the difference?
The cannabis plant when left to itself doesn’t create much THC (which is what gets you high), but it is very useful for making rope and clothing, as well as oil and other products. Only when you make sure that you only have female plants (and take care of them in a certain way) do they produce lots of THC.
So just because the plant is growing somewhere doesn’t mean that someone is smoking it.
Thank you for the explanation! I thought that when people referred to cannabis, they always referred to its euphoric properties so I got a bit confused, haha.
I remember having one of these plants growing in my backyard because we had cockatiels when I was a kid and we would throw the leftover seeds in the backyard when they were up for new feed. Sometimes the leftover seeds would turn into plants and rather quickly, we had a 2 meters tall cannabis plant in the backyard which made my dad freak the fuck out and chop it down as soon as ne found out what that plant was. It was a very impressive plant, but probably not an infamous female.
The active drug part of the plant is the resin found at the flowers of the female hemp plant, created during pollination season. There is neglible amounts of THC in the rest of the plant, as in basically nothing. So you would only get high if you smoked that particular part of the plant, not the rest. So sailors could have saved on tobacco by using the dried leaves of the harvested hemp plants they imported for rope, but it wouldn’t have made them stoned in the slightest.
Yes but it was found in clay pipes. I.e. smoking pipes. For whatever reason it was being smoked there.
Your sailor analogy is a possible explanation, but it doesn’t make as much sense in a home or domestic setting.
It might not have gotten them as high as modern weed but it definitely still would have worked, they’re not gonna smoke it for no reason
Yeah it has been suggested it was used for medicinal purposes as early as 1 BCE. I have a feeling they’d have discovered how to make it stronger in the ensuing 1500 years.
To add, hemp was farmed for it’s fibers, to make rope and fabric
So he was smoking hemp?
It was in a pipe though?
Sorry, I read it as plumbing pipe for some reason.
I always hated Shakespeare, mostly because of how it’s taught.
Imagine reading about Quinten Tarantino in the future, they study his methods, his dialogue and cinematography, but they hand you his screenplays and ask you to analyze them. Not once actually showing you one of his movies.
In high school they tried to make me read all that nonsense and I had no idea what any of it meant. As an adult i saw a play as it was meant, and it gave me much more context and visual understanding. I still don’t get why he wrote like that, I prefer clear language over poetry, but I at least appreciated it way more than i did as a kid being forced to read
Tarantino screenplays are good fun to read though
*zoom in to her feet*
Reading Shakespeare is torture. That is why we make actors do it for us.
It was written in prose so it could be memorized and to hide injendos and jokes.
Do you think the future teachers will have a section dedicated to feet in Tarantino movies??? 🤨
Drugs were always very common through all the history, Cannabis was used until the 20th century as “tobaco for the poor”, apart of Cannabis also funghi and other psycho active plants known in Europe in the middle age and before, eg by artists as inspiration.
Cannabis was used until the 20th century as “tobaco for the poor”
No, it wasn’t.
sure it was! it left all the pure Columbian cocaine for the Tudors.
It was, because tobacco was very expensive in europe (being a colonial good), and cannabis was widely available (as a byproduct of the fabric and rope industry). Once smoking became fashionable, people looked for ways to smoke even if they couldn’t afford tobacco. Cannabis was a popular replacement.
We talking weed here or hemp?
Can we get a source?
According to this article, we have no idea. It does not support OPs claim tho. (At least this article doesn’t). Other sources might.
https://www.veriheal.com/blog/how-our-founding-fathers-used-cannabis-in-colonial-america/
TIL!
I don’t have one unfortunately, I read about it at the hemp museum in Amsterdam
Yeah before people in America made a big stink about it and said it’lll turn you crazy or into a mexican, or whatever racist unscientific garbage excuse they made to start a moral panic to make it illegal, people smoked or otherwise consumed cannabis. It was just normal. The same way people consume drugs like coffee today, yes coffee is a drug.
It was the blacks getting the white women high that did it
Here’s the paper for anyone interested. TLDR: In 2001 cocain residue was found alongside tobacco and hemp residue. There were also refrences to drugs in art and poems that the author supposes are cocain and cannabis. Fastwarward to 2023 when traces of cocain THC & CBD were found in bones from Milan. Today the author of the 2001 study is using the 2023 results to support his findings. As far as I can tell no one else has tried to test the pipe fragments.
Imagine it was all tested in the same lab, contaminated by the same coked up pothead lab tech.
Contamination may actually be a concern here since AFAIK no independent analysis of the clay pipe fragments or the bones has been done yet, but it’d have to be 2 coked up pothead lab techs since the clay pipe fragments were tested in a police narcotics lab in South Africa while the bones were tested at the excavation site in Milan.
Wait, how can that be right? Shakespeare had access to coca leaves and was smoking them? I know it’s not literally impossible but it seems unlikely…
Francis Thackeray, in his 2025 article, suggests Sir Francis Drake could have acquired it when sailing in the area. Since traces of it were also discovered in 1600s Milan its possible that the spanish were circulating it. This 2024 study discusses how the Spanish at least knew of it as early as 1499.
As a former poet, this is 10000% accurate
i’m not what you’d call a poet, i handle the instruments, but i have this thing where for example the word for cat gets stuck between your brain and your tongue so you say claws cuddler or something like that (sorry, coffee is brewing you don’t get a good one yet) and when a good one pops out you get good poetry. i blame the drugs.
Weed —> iambic pentameter
How many millions of brilliant people have been executed over the drug war? Depending on how you classify “drug war” (like the wars over opium, or chocolate for that matter), they have been murdering people over this for centuries (whether to push or pull).
… and they still do today. It’s an abomination, our modern version of the witch hunt.
