A new study suggests that British literary figure William Shakespeare might have been under the influence of drugs when composing his works of art.

According to a paper published in the South African Journal of Science, researchers in the country’s administrative capital city of Pretoria employed a state-of-the-art technology to analyze 24 pipe fragments excavated from the great British dramatist’s garden and other adjacent areas in Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare’s birthplace and residence, concluding that the Bard most probably smoked cannabis during his lifetime.

The gas chromatography mass spectrometry technique helped identify the remains in the 400-year-old pipe fragments, with researchers tracing cannabis in eight samples, Peruvian cocaine in two and nicotine in at least one.

The striking point of the study was the detection of cannabis in four samples recovered from Shakespeare’s garden.

Back in May, Mark D. Griffiths, a renowned English psychologist, claimed that he had found an engraving of Shakespeare’s face in the frontispiece of one of the most significant botanical books of the late 16th century.

According to Griffiths, John Gerard’s The Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes (1597), which set to introduce different kinds of natural drugs in Europe, portrays Shakespeare on its front page, another potential testimony to the Bard’s interest in opium.

Other commentators have also pointed to Shakespeare’s sonnets to substantiate the claim that the writer smoked cannabis, with some referring to his Sonnet 76, in which he seems to hail “invention in a noted weed.”

Critics say the phrase shows that the Bard’s artistic creation (“invention”) was stimulated by “weed,” which they interpret as another name for cannabis.

Elsewhere in the sonnet, the persona speaks about his reluctance to employ “new-found methods” and “compounds strange,” which critics believe show Shakespeare’s aversion to such deleterious narcotics as cocaine.