Comments on: Van Gogh’s Cowboy Boys Shakespeare’s Pot

By: g bruno

g bruno — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 20:54:54 +0000

cannabis hemp makes good sailcloth. Manila hemp makes salt-resistant rope, but MH is related to Banana, not Cannabis. AS Buckminster Fuller said, a C16 ship started out with English Oak planks, but wasnt complete until once round the world – Batavia Teak deck, Manila hemp lines etc.

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 21:00:20 +0000

drbubbles: The pipe bowls are much more closely linked to Shakespeare’s residency than your argument makes them seem.

One can’t prove who smoked the pipes, but they can be dated to a short time span, do not last long, and were manufactured, used, and discarded, almost certainly, during the time Shakespeare lived in the place they were found.

By: Nemo

Nemo — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 19:01:47 +0000

Cris Ericson, I’m all for ending marijuana prohibition, but I can’t see why that would require a constitutional amendment (which makes it much more difficult). You realize that the only reason it took an amendment to end alcohol prohibition was that there’d previously been an amendment to enact alcohol prohibition — right? Marijuana doesn’t have that problem.

By: drbubbles

drbubbles — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 02:38:40 +0000

Color me unimpressed. Even if “all the evidence” really does, there’s not very much, is there? The sonnet quotes in the linked article are all vague, and anyway those are the best, if not only, ones they found in 150 sonnets? Please. The literary evidence here uses the same “consistent with” reasoning that the “Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare” proponents use. It might be suggestive but it’s hardly convincing. And, FWIW, Shakespearean criticism is littered with dead hypotheses based upon otherwise-unwarranted readings of a very few lines, so skepticism here is not unwarranted.

I’m not sure what the attitude of the Shakespearean establishment has to do with anything. Assuming Van Gogh really was murdered, it has no bearing whatsoever on whether the Bard took some hits. The mountain gorilla proved to be real but it doesn’t make the Loch Ness Monster more likely.

But what is most damning to my mind is the pot residue from “Shakespeare’s garden” dating to “Shakespeare’s time”. If this is a reference to a Stratford house, it’s worth noting that there are several houses where Shakespeare actually might have lived, that Shakespeare spent most of 20 years in London while his family stopped in Stratford, and that Shakespeare likely didn’t spend much time in the house he retired in until the last 10 y of his life. On the other hand, if it’s a reference to a London garden, he moved house in London even more often than in Stratford. The point is that, whether in Stratford or London, dope residue in “Shakespeare’s garden” from “Shakespeare’s time” could have come from many other people, and Shakespeare being a BMOC doesn’t make it more likely that it was his, even considering those vague lines from the sonnets.

If the argument is that there’s evidence that toking was not uncommon in Elizabethan England so Shakespeare probably did it, too, that’s another thing; but in that case, the literary evidence is even less relevant and the residue-garden-date association little more than anecdotal.

So, as far as I can tell, the null hypothesis stands.

By: Cris Ericson

Cris Ericson — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 19:09:35 +0000

Hours left to sign White House petition to
END MARIJUANA PROHIBITION

http://wh.gov/gP1

petition

Case sensitive, upper case P,
Adults & kids age 13 & up
can sign!

UMBRELLA for all other HEMP,
CANNABIS & MARIJUANA issues!

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Only at the White House for hours
more – PLEASE HURRY & CLICK & SIGN

http://wh.gov/gP1