Virtual Grub Street: On Shakespeare and Drinking Smoke.

In 2015, the findings of a 2002 study of some tobacco pipes found in the garden at William Shakspere’s New Place home, in Stratford-upon-Avon, were published. The headlines were irresistible. The style of the pipes pointed to manufacture during the early 17^th century when Shakspere would have been living there. The findings had been inconclusive but suggested that the pipe bowls contained residue of marijuana. Scores of reports appeared in popular media.

Being tobacco pipes the assumption, in some circles, was that the one sure thing was that they had been used to smoke tobacco. The debate raged for some time: Had Shakespeare smoked pot? Tobacco? Both?

A great deal of silliness was spouted.

The New World herb that came to be called tobacco arrived in Europe via Spain around 1560. It was a medicine, at that point, and taken in various preparations but not yet smoked. It seems primarily to have been ground into a powder and added to medicinal recipes or reduced into an oil. Like all exotic herbs and plants from the New World, at first it was beyond the means of all but a small wealthy class.

Reputed to be the first to “drink” tobacco ( the term for what we call “smoking”) was Ralph Lane, the governor of the second of Sir Walter Raleigh’s Virginia expeditions, in 1586. The lands from which the Spanish first brought back the herb seem to have chewed on it for energy much like they did the cocoa leaf. The Virginia natives, on the other hand, had come to smoke it in pipes they called “tabaca”. Raleigh’s expeditionaries brought back the habit of groups drinking from a single communal pipe handed around.

Raleigh is said, apocryphally, to have drunk his smoke alone at times.[1] If true, this may well be the only description of having one’s private tobacco and pipe until Thomas Lodge’s complaint about the popular habit in his Wit's Miserie, and the World's Madnesse (1596).

Ben Jonson’s Every Man Out of his Humour (1598) portrays the drinking of smoke as the ultimate sign of a London “gentleman”. The common London citizen-class becoming rapidly more wealthy, they defined down the term “gentleman” to fit their purposes. Already, in 1598, the gentleman was an adept at forming smoke rings and puffing smoke out of his mouth and drawing it in through his nose (known as “the whiff”).

By the time of Thomas Dekker’s The Gull's Horn-book (1602), in spite of years of constant satire, by numerous writers, the art of drinking smoke had grown to wonderful proportions:

Before the meat come smoking to the board, our gallant must draw out his tobacco-box, the ladle for the cold snuff into the nostril, the tongs, and priming-iron; all which artillery may be of gold or silver, if he can reach the price of it; it will be a reasonable useful pawn at all times, when the amount of his money falls out to run low. And here you must observe to know in what tobacco is in town, better than the merchants, and to discourse of the apothecaries where it is to be sold; then let him show his several tricks in taking it, as the whiff, the ring, &c, for these are compliments that gain gentlemen no mean respect.[2]

By this time yet another new aspect of gentlemen smoking was also becoming more prevalent in London plays. Gentle women are portrayed as being entirely turned off by the habit. They are revolted by the smell of their paramours’ breath. A little further along in the history of the stage appears perfumed tobacco. The data would seem to indicate mixed results at best in the love-making department. Ladies of the street, however, were often enough so demonstrably hardy as to drink smoke themselves. Presumably finishing their quaff with a belch.

The character Sogliardo, in Every Man Out, having at long last managed to buy a family crest from the College of Heralds, is next eager to learn the art of drinking smoke in order to fulfill his responsibilities in his new rank. It was next in importance to going heavily in debt to one’s tailor.

Sogliardo, it turns out, is fashioned closely upon the biography of William Shakspere of Stratford. It has long been a scholarly commonplace that the two are one and the same. None of the participants seems to have caught onto this coincidence during the 2015 debates. It seems Jonson has informed us outright that Shakspere did indeed smoke — tobacco. It was only one of the ways that Jonson found him a ridiculous pretender, a “clown”.

But this leaves the matter in an uncomfortable condition only hinted at in 2015. Of all of the younger playwrights actively writing plays from 1598 onward Shakespeare alone has not one single reference to smoking in all of his works. It isn’t that he never wrote about the life of the London streets. He has given us many classic street scenes drawn from the life of the city. But smoking does not exist in them. Not in the slightest hint. It is as if drinking smoke did not exist in his world rather than going on everywhere around him.

[1] The same exact anecdote is told of Raleigh and Richard Tarleton.

[2] Dekker, Thomas. The Gull's Horn Book by Thomas Dekker (1609, 1905), ed. Mckerrow. 35.

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