Ten years ago, South African anthropologist Francis Thackeray suggested that William Shakespeare was a pot smoker, based on 24 pipes from the 17th century that showed traces of marijuana and were found near the bard's house. Now the determined researcher has petitioned the Church of England for permission to exhume Shakespeare's body in order to determine the cause of death and to conduct a post-mortem drug test.

Shakespeare died in 1616 and is buried in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon. Apparently afraid of grave-robbers, he had a warning engraved on his tomb, which concludes, "Blessed be the man that spares these stones / And cursed be he who moves my bones." Undeterred, Thackeray told Live Science that if granted permission he and his team would not actually move the bones, instead using laser surface scanning to create digital scans of the remains of Shakespeare, his wife Anne Hathaway, and his daughter Susanna. The scans could then be turned into three-dimensional images of their bodies, which, Thackeray hopes, will provide clues about the bard's health and death. But such clues are far from a sure thing. Anthropologist Kristina Killgrove also Live Science that analyzing the skeleton could provide information about diseases such as osteoporosis, but is unlikely to yield information about any illnesses that aren't bone-specific.

Thackeray, who is the director of the Institute for Human Evolution at Johannesburg's University of Witwatersrand, also said that he hopes to find hair, fingernails, or toenails in Shakespeare's grave so that they can be tested for traces of marijuana. The bard's teeth could also be signs of pipe-smoking, though this would not reveal whether tobacco or marijuana was used. Grooves between the canine and incisor teeth have been found on skeletons from Virginia that date to Shakespeare's time and indicate that a pipe was clenched between the teeth.

Thackeray first became curious to know whether Shakespeare was a marijuana user when considering sonnet 76, where the poet writes of "keep[ing] invention in a noted weed." In 2001, the 24 pipes from the area around Shakespeare's home in Stratford-upon-Avon were analyzed by South Africa's Forensic Science Laboratory at his behest. Not only did the lab's Tommy van der Merwe say that they showed traces of marijuana, he also maintained that two of them had the same kind of residue "as a modern-day crack pipe," according to National Geographic.

But claims of cocaine use may be harder to prove. It's quite possible that the pipes, which may never have belonged to Shakespeare in the first place, were smoked by cocaine users from a later era and then discarded. Although cannabis was grown in Elizabethan England, where hemp was used to manufacture sails, rope, and clothing, cocaine was not refined until the 19th century. Beginning in the 16th century, Spanish explorers discovered the euphoric properties of coca leaves used by South Americans, but there is "little evidence that it was exported" to Europe until much later, social scientist Daniel Bradburd told National Geographic.

While Thackeray said that he has already contacted the Church of England with the request, church officials told Fox News that they hadn't yet heard anything about his project.