Right now it is 4:20 p.m. on 4/20, which is, as we all know, the best time and date to get high. I can think of no better poem to celebrate this rare occasion than William Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 76,” the poem South African anthropologist Francis Thackeray cites as textual evidence to support his famous argument that the legendary English poet and playwright probably smoked weed.
Inspired by a line from the poem (“Why write I still all one, ever the same / And keep invention in a noted weed”), Thackeray analyzed a bunch of 17th century pipes found in and around Shakespeare’s home in Stratford upon Avon and found them full of druggy compounds.
As Edward Delman helpfully points out in the Atlantic, Thackeray’s team actually determined that the results of the chemical tests were “suggestive but do not prove the presence of cannabis,” though they do show more convincing evidence of other hallucinogens, and even cocaine. That said, Delman reminds us, Shakespeare’s home eventually became an inn after his death, and the broad dating on the pipes isn’t exact enough to definitively put the bong in the bard’s hands.
But then, of course, there’s the poem itself, which you can find in Shakespeare’s Sonnets (I prefer the Arden edition), available at your local bookstore.
A few notes on this “noted weed:”
• If we can push the weed stuff a side for a moment, it’s helpful to know that the poem is about stagnation, and the tension between an essential truth and the poet’s charge: there’s nothing new under the sun, and yet the poet must “make it new.”
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.
• The speaker, who is about halfway into what would eventually become a sequence of 154 sonnets, confronts the working artist’s central dilemma: How do I keep it fresh? Why not try writing a novel? Or a screenplay? The problem in this case, as Shakespeare lays out just before the volta, i.e. the “turn” of the argument expected at the end of every sonnet, is that he can’t stop writing about his love for the “fair youth,” the object of his affections in the first half of the sequence. He finds a solution to this problem in metaphor: “For as the sun is daily new and old, So is my love still telling what is told.” Days look like they’re the same, but each one is fresh, just like all these love poems. So, ha. Now let’s make out.
• I would disgrace the legacy of one of my former Shakespeare professors, Loreen Giese, if I didn’t mention that Shakespeare’s use of the word “argument” in this poem—”O! know sweet love I always write of you, / And you and love are still my argument;”—fits in with his obsession of speaking of love in lawyerly terms. Giese’s work on a woman’s agency within marriage customs in Early Modern England is fascinating if you have a moment to spare and an active JSTOR account. She spends a lot of her time reading 16th and 17th century divorce depositions written in wild script, and they’re a hoot.
• Anyway, back to the pot stuff. Here’s the juicy bit:
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…
• As Thackeray suggests, “noted weed” likely refers to bomb-ass fucking kush, especially since the word choice appears to play off of the decidedly druggy reference to “compounds strange” earlier in the verse. But “noted weed” also obviously refers to poetry, a musical or “noted” genre that proliferated like a “weed” during Shakespeare’s time, and, thankfully, during our own.
• On a personal note, 76 has always been one of my favorite sonnets. I memorized it during a poetry seminar at the Friday Harbor labs in my last year of grad school, so it’s always with me. After four years of studying poetry and pretty much only writing love poems the whole time, I felt tremendous pressure to write about literally anything else. Though I thought the entire purpose of studying poetry was to write the best love poem you possibly could and then exit the field a champion, I saw others having some success writing about other subjects and wanted to show my range. At the end of the day, however, you and love are still my argument. So all my best is dressing old words new, spending again what is already spent.
