I got interested in the Tarot years ago - at first it was the images that fascinated me, with their obscure names and bizarre artwork, and the multiplicity of different themes for deck designs.  Some Tarot decks are beautiful, miniature works of art; others, quite frankly, look like they have been illustrated by a four year old child.  Later, I became intrigued by the different facets of the history of the Tarot.  Every age seems to hang different meanings on the Tarot - find in it resonances with Hermeticism, humanism, feminism, ethnic awareness, Freudian dream analysis, and so on, and so on.  How could such a simple device - 78 cards - mean so many different things to different people?

While at college, I did a couple of tarot readings for friends, and was amazed to find how my simple generalisations seemed to have them nodding in agreement.  It seemed that whatever I said, it was what they wanted to hear.  That was my first clue to my understanding of the Tarot.  The second clue came at work - we were discussing how we made difficult decisions, and a colleague said that he always tossed a coin.  When we expressed some scepticism, his response was that when he couldn't choose between options because the consequences were too great or the issues too complicated, he tossed a coin, and, inevitably, as the coin was in the air, he found himself hoping for one or other outcome.  Subconsciously, he already knew the answer to his dilemma - he just needed a mechanism to drag it out into the light.

And that, really is my conception of the Tarot: it's a decision-making aid.  Ask a question, an issue which has puzzled or baffled you, and it will help you to find the answer you already know.  That's why the meanings of the cards are so general and so vague - your mind will filter the meanings to find those that correspond to what you are worried about and discard the rest.

THE CARD IMAGES ARE MNEMONIC DEVICES to help the reader remember the meanings behind them.  This is the reason for the many and varied deck themes - each is an attempt to find the right images to evoke those meanings, and each is correct in its time and place.  What I felt I wanted was a set of images that I could relate to: the best I discovered was the Mythic Tarot of Juliet Sharman-Burke, based on Greek mythology, but even that didn't feel quite right.  Casting around for an idea, I thought of Shakespeare, a passion of mine, and realised a Tarot based on his plays could be perfect.  I found details of a Shakespeare tarot on the WWW, but it was out of print, and, from descriptions, I felt many of the choices made for card images were incorrect.  So I would have to design my own!

My first rules were simple: all of the accepted plays in the canon would be included, and, borrowing an idea from the Mythic Tarot, each suit (excluding court cards) would correspond to a single play, with the number sequence based on the narrative sequence of the play.  Four suits, sixteen court cards and twenty-two major arcana added up to forty-two correspondences. There are thirty-nine plays in the canon currently; adding the sonnets made forty; so two plays would feature twice.  As it turned, when I came to make the assignments there were two that could be completely justified and which I was perfectly happy with.  But more of that later.

Assigning plays or characters to cards was an interesting process.  I assigned the four suits to plays at the start, as I felt I needed to choose some of the classics in order to have enough material to work with to generate ten cards.  This meant that some important characters missed out on having their own 'name' card, but I felt that the suit-play correspondence was, in some ways, of greater importance.  When assigning individual cards, some correspondences leaped out as obvious, others required a lot of thinking.  My first trawl through left me with, for some cards, two or three possible characters.  The next stage was to go through and check that each of the plays had one card, and no more; this meant I had to occasionally choose a character other than the most obvious because the 'best' was from a play which had another, better, correspondence with another card.  I was then left with a handful of plays with no card, and a handful of plays with more than one card: reassigning these was the most difficult part of the task, but I eventually felt I had achieved a good 'fit'.