VII. THE PLAY

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 How one interprets and understands The Shakespeare Tarot is as open and personal as how one interprets and understands Shakespeare's opus. Significance within the imagery are as varied as the poet's words and their meanings. The correspondence of character and plot to ideas inherent to a given card of the Tarot echoes how Shakespeare himself wielded and forged his sources, be they historical, literary, or ideational. The chemistry of a cast at any given time and the receptivity of its audience are an aspect of the unknown made manifest, given voice and made known in part through art, in part through nature. Through human agency, art and nature assay one another and are essayed, creating something nonpareil, greater than either were alone. 

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 Whether one accepts or rejects the idea of synchronicity, or finds dreams telling or moot, the tropes of human behaviour reflected in its culture are as the language which constitute the various canals and passageways of our very minds. If nothing else, the sanctioned rights of passage and subliminal rites of trespass hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to our nature. Regardless of in what esteem we may hold a dream itself, the things in waking we feel and choose to articulate about what our unfettered mind devised from its contents tells us, willing to hear, how we act, where we list, what we make, who we are. The Will directs, is who I am; left to its own devices, it may well consider itself king of infinite space. What dreams may come, invading this sterile sanctum, are a breath of fresh air, a spirit of hope, of truth, of holy, a thief in the night, no more yielding but a dream. A little slight of hand is needed, the harsh words of Mercury to unstop the ears, Autolycus singing some old snatch about a wolf in shepherd's clothing - 

 

Give me your hands, if we be friends,

And robbin' shall restore amends...

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