Just in time for Pride month, The Shakespeare Tarot stands as both a tribute and a bold revision of your traditional tarot deck. Conceived by illustrator and writer Bridget Randolph, this hand-illustrated tarot deck explores the Bard’s timeless characters through a queer, inclusive lens.
Currently live on Kickstarter, The Shakespeare Tarot reimagines all 78 cards through the lens of Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets, while consciously weaving queer themes into its fabric. Randolph describes the deck as “an homage to Shakespeare’s expansive, layered characters and the way they’ve shaped our ideas of identity, fate, and transformation.” But this is not merely a literary gimmick. Rather, the deck offers a deeply personal and poetic reflection on the performance of self, the construction of identity, and the power of language to reframe destiny.
Every card features hand-drawn pen-and-ink illustrations, many of which merge characters from multiple plays to highlight the archetypal qualities that transcend plot. Hamlet appears as The Hanged Man. Prospero and Ariel take center stage in The Magician. Beatrice and Benedick exchange swords and wits in the Two of Swords. Each figure is rooted in the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot system, yet refracted through Randolph’s understanding of theater, queerness, and myth.
Notably, the deck does not treat gender as fixed. Instead, Randolph deliberately casts characters fluidly across the gender spectrum, mirroring the ways Shakespeare’s own plays toyed with disguise, duality, and subversion. “Shakespeare’s work has always been queer,” Randolph notes in the campaign video. “This project simply holds a mirror up to that queerness and lets it shine.”
As a writer, Randolph has long been drawn to stories that blur binaries and complicate narratives. With The Shakespeare Tarot, that impulse becomes spiritual. The tarot deck, long used as a tool for reflection and personal insight, becomes a stage where queer stories can unfold with agency and clarity.
What happens when we let the Fool be Rosalind, the Lovers be Antony and Cleopatra, or Death be Lear in the storm? What happens when we read our lives through the eyes of characters who’ve lived for centuries and let them read us back?
As Shakespeare once wrote, “We know what we are, but know not what we may be.” With The Shakespeare Tarot, Randolph gives us a map to that unknown.
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Follow the Campaign:
The Shakespeare Tarot is live on Kickstarter starting from $45. Explore the project and support it here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/bridgetrandolph/the-shakespeare-tarot-a-queer-hand-illustrated-tarot-deck
About the Creator:
Bridget Randolph is an illustrator, writer, and queer storyteller currently based in the UK. You can follow their work and process at @bridgetrandolphart on Instagram.
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