Scientists have revealed from examination of his pipe that William Shakespeare smoked both cocaine and marijuana. Drug-taking doesn't seem to have done him a great deal of harm, though perhaps the first drafts of his speeches written under the influence had to be amended in the cold light of a post-drugs dawn. "To be or not to be, or whatever: I mean, like, so what, who gives a shit, man?" seemed so profound and wise at midnight. Morning was not so kind to it.
The drugs might explain the uncorrected mixed metaphor which appears in the most famous speech in the English language and which no editor worth his salt would permit today: for how can one take arms against a sea of troubles? And was it the errant hand of narcosis which caused Julius Caesar to hear the clock chime, a millennium and more before a clock's chime was first invented?
Full fathom five
But can we not hear the whimsy of hallucinogenia (if Shakespeare can make up words, why can't I?) in Ariel's songs in The Tempest: "Full fathom five thy father lies;/ Of his bones are coral made;/ Those are pearls that were his eyes;/ Nothing of him that doth fade/ But doth suffer a sea-change/ Into something rich and strange./ Sea nymphs hourly ring his knell:/ Dingdong. Hark! I hear them ding-dong bell."
Does it not need the whiff of distant grasses from foreign lands to turn a dead dad into such an alliterative melody, full fathom five they father lies? And with scant regard for grammar or auditory reality, for how does coral, singular, command a plural verb? And how can one ring a bell under water, as Ariel does, without it being a dull clunk? All these things are made possible only by imbibing vegetative substances from afar.
Warwickshire, Shakespeare's home county, is a solid place, its people down to earth, industrious, measured and careful. They are the descendants of the forest-dwelling charcoal burners who discovered iron ore deposits. Combining their ancient skills with natural resources, the county thus produced gunsmiths, ironworks, bicycles, and later motor cars. It is not a promising background from which to find the greatest writer the world has ever seen. Did a Warwickshire man's pen need an artificial stimulus? Is it possible that a son of the introspective, brooding tribe of woodsmen on the banks of the Avon could unassisted have written a single word of A Midsummer Night's Dream?
Hempen homespuns
And might we not wonder about Shakespeare's true meaning when he asks: "What hempen homespuns have we swagg'ring here, So near the cradle of the Fairy Queen?" What kind of hemp did the Bard have in mind? And it is hard to see how a Stratford man of his own devices alone could have penned, "I know a bank whereon the wild thyme blows,/ Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows/ Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,/ With sweet muskroses, and with eglantine:/ There sleeps Titania some time of the night,/ Lulled in these flowers with dances and delight;/ And there the snake throws her enamelled skin,/ Weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in."
Does the fantastic imagery not suggest that Shakespeare's imagination had been dispatched to locations it could not possibly have reached on its own? Is is not peculiar how his characters keep falling asleep in this strange forest near Athens? What bizarre narcotic conjunction introduces the Irish spirit of Puck, who also goes by the quintessentially English name of Robin Goodfellow (Robin Hood?) to this Greek woodland? Too many collisions from too many corners of the brain for the ordinary, unhallucinogenised brain to have arranged.
Is Macbeth not largely one long bad, trip? Banquo's ghost, shaking his gory locks, suggests that Shakespeare's dealer had been cutting his dope with some bad stuff. Is it not clear that one of Macbeth's witches clearly had an attack of the munchies as well as a fit of the heeby-jeebies? "A sailor's wife had chestnuts in her lap, And mounch'd, and mounch'd, and mounch'd, 'Give me,' quoth I. 'Aroint thee witch,!' the rump-fed ronyon cries. Her husband's to Aleppo gone, master of th' Tiger; But in a sieve I'll thither sail, and like a rat without a tail, I'll do, I'll do, and I'll do."
Fevered mind
The imagery here is the offspring of a fevered mind, almost demented with hunger - why else would an incorporate witch dwell on food, on chestnuts, and even mention the kind of steak on which the ronyon (what, pray, is a ronyon?) has fed. And later we can hear the hum and hymn of resin, as the witches intone: "Eye of newt and toe of frog, wool of bat and tongue of dog, Adder's fork, and blind worm's sting, lizard's leg, and howlet's wing, For a charm of powerful trouble, Like a hellbroth of boil and bubble. . .Liver of blaspheming Jew, Gall of goat and slips of yew, Silvered in the moon's eclipse, Nose of Turk, and Tartar's lips, Finger of birthstrangled babe, Ditch-delivered by a drab, Make the gruel thick and slab."
Now we know from scientific analysis of his pipe: Shakespeare took drugs. But was the evidence not before our eyes all along, in the visions which haunted his prose? The human brain has not been invented that could take us on such journeys, to ocean bed and woodland glade, and roam at will over the pastures and the appenines of the English language, without the quicksilver wings of narcosis - wings that are now, alas, illegal.