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The SHAKESPEARE TAROT
PREFACE
The Shakespeare Tarot is an interdisciplinary retelling of the tarot divined from the literary universe created by William Shakespeare. The Shakespearean world in turn drew and grew from diverse branches of Western culture - from Ovid to Chaucer, ballads to the Bible - transplanting the Italian Renaissance to England during its formative Empire building under the Maistre of the Virgin Queen, translating this Humanist Renaissance into English along the way.
The English language at the time was protean, untamed. Shakespeare compounded and sculpted language in ways hitherto unknown, reaching into recesses of the collective unconscious through a gallery of isolated souls. The resulting network of agency, incident, invocation, and character cast a human die. The tarot, which began as a set of playing cards for the Italian aristocracy, became a motley repository of human thought and experience - emulating the English language itself, cobbled and forged from the same weeds. The Shakespeare Tarot holds Hamlet's mirror to humanity, showing the body of Time its form and pressure, for the play's the thing - we must speak by the card, or equivocation will undo us.