I drink, therefore I am?

"Thou art so fat-witted, with drinking of old sack
and unbuttoning thee after supper and sleeping
upon benches after noon, that thou hast forgotten
to demand that truly which thou wouldst truly
know. What a devil hast thou to do with the time of
the day?"

                                                                 Henry IV, Part 1       (I, ii)


To amuse himself, Shakespeare's Prince Hal gives that old drunken fatso, Sir John Falstaff, a hard time about his gourmandizing ways. Falstaff loves to drink, to eat, to chase tavern wenches, to put coinage in his pocket with as little physical effort as possible. Yet he soars to the Icarian heights of Shakespeare's imagination and becomes, aside from Hamlet, the playwright's most memorable character.

He is refreshingly unapologetic about who he is, what little (if anything) he's willing to fight and kill for, or what he's willing to lie, booze, or snooze through in order to make his life more comfortable. He'll take on the world with a cup of wine in his hand, or not at all.

Pictured above, in the collection of Agecroft Hall, is a coconut shell goblet, made with English silver around 1640. It is not nearly as finely crafted or as ornate as an essentially similar goblet that Queen Elizabeth had arranged to be made from a coconut shell given to her by her favorite seafaring rogue, Sir Francis Drake, after Drake returned to England following a circumnavigation of the globe. That was in 1580, when William Shakespeare was sixteen.

Drake and his crew had done more than circle the earth: they had harassed Spanish shipping and silver mining operations, particularly along the Pacific coasts of South and Central America, making off across the Pacific with an enormous load of loot that would leave the English back home in a state of open-mouthed astonishment. Queen Elizabeth had winked at Drake's privateering, since she herself had a financial interest in his activities. Elizabeth wasn't stupid: she realized that Spain's loss was essentially her own nation's gain. Looking the other way while Drake enjoyed a round of high-seas pilfering seemed easy enough, so that's exactly what she did.

Elizabeth made her admiration of Drake quite clear when she had him knighted on the deck of his ship, the Golden Hind, for his exploits. It was said by many, including Sir Francis Drake himself, that no man knew more about sailing a ship, and his world-circling and piratical saga had proven it was indeed so.

Agecroft Hall's coconut cup helps provide us with an idea of how enamored the English and Europeans on the continent had become with exotic objects from the faraway places that were coming to light in this new age of exploration. One might think of coconut shells from the Pacific or similarly exotic flora and fauna as a bit like the moon rocks of our own day: so many of these things were totally new to the eyes of the English, and their curiosity would only grow.

By the time Shakespeare was writing The Tempest (probably 1611), his last known play without collaboration, he was using the imagery of an alluring new world filled with unfamiliar sights and sounds to craft scenes that have enchanted playgoers for four centuries.