Washington: A team of scientists has submitted a formal application to the Church of England for exhumation of William Shakespeare’s remains so that they can find out about his life and death, and if he smoked weed.
The team led by Francis Thackeray, an anthropologist and director of the Institute for Human Evolution at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa hopes to dig up the bard’s grave in Stratford-upon-Avon.
The team plans to perform the forensic analysis using state-of-the-art technology to scan the bones and create a reconstruction.
The team also looks to address a suggestion Thackeray made a decade ago, when he examined a collection of two dozen pipes found in the bard’s garden and determined that Shakespeare was an avid marijuana smoker.
“If we find grooves between the canine and the incisor, that will tell us if he was chewing on a pipe as well as smoking,” Thackeray said while citing similar evidence found in Virginia.
Thackeray claimed the devices were used to smoke cannabis, a plant actively cultivated in Britain at the time.
The exhumation of Shakespeare’s remains has never been attempted before, and it has partly been put down to the curse the bard had engraved on his tomb out of fear of his body being dug up.
“Good frend for Jesus sake forebeare,/ To digg the dust encloased heare;/ Bleste be the man that spares thes stones,/ And curst be he that moves my bones,” the curse read. (ANI)