Taurus (20 April - 20 May)

original art by Bex McKay

William Shakespeare: Yes, We Know, You’ve Heard of Him

Our Taurus writer is William Shakespeare, and if you don’t know who he is, well, we can’t help you. He is considered to be the greatest writer in history by the same people who decided that the literary canon should contain only works by white men from western Europe and North America, so make of that what you will.

 Taurus is an earth sign – a practical sign that loves physical pleasures. Have you ever read a Shakespeare play? As school kids, we read Shakespeare (usually Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, or, at more forward-thinking schools, A Midsummer Night’s Dream) and had to have it translated for us, and it’s only later that we got to giggle at the many filthy jokes that Shakespeare, not only a good playwright but a practical businessman, put in for the benefit of the folks in the cheap seats who weren’t too proud to laugh at a fart joke or roar at some saucy innuendo.

The tarot card for this sign is the five of pentacles, a card that, when upright, signifies adversity and disgrace, and when reversed signifies recovery from loss and positive changes, which describe the plot of nearly every Shakespeare play. But what does this card signify for Shakespeare personally? It’s hard to say, since so little is known about Shakespeare the man.  

There is much speculation about his early life, but what we do know is that he pitched up in London and wrote for and acted at various theaters for a number of years after his last two children were born in 1585. In a case of both adversity and disgrace, the theater at which Shakespeare was working in London (along with all the other theaters in London) was closed in June 1592 due to concerns about a severe outbreak of plague and the possibility of civil unrest resulting from it. And although by this time Shakespeare was already beginning to enjoy some success as a playwright, at the time, it wasn’t seen as a prestigious (or even respectable) profession.  

While Shakespeare’s fortunes were reversed, he turned his tarot card upside down, and recovered from his losses by turning to poetry and winning the patronage and favor of many influential members of the nobility and gentry. Shakespeare’s romantic poetry might feel dated and silly to modern readers (C. S. Lewis hated it), but at the time it went through 15 editions, quite the success for a relative unknown.  

While he went on to unquestioned fame as a playwright, there is still so much of his life about which we can only speculate. One of his last and most mysterious acts was to bequeath to his wife Anne “my second-best bed.” Many see this as a slap in the face, but Tauruses (Taurii?) are famously steadfast. In Elizabethan times, that bed would have been their marriage bed, which would have had great sentimental significance to his wife, and I like to think that’s how that gesture was meant.  

Tauruses have a reputation as one of the hardest working signs of the zodiac, and we’ll leave you with a few of the many words that Shakespeare invented that are still in use today (note – most of these concepts existed long before Shakespeare, but these specific words were not used to express them until Shakespeare made them up):

Addiction (Othello)
Bedazzled (The Taming of the Shrew)
Eyeball (The Tempest)
Lonely (Coriolanus)
Majestic (Henry VIII)
Manager (A Midsummer Night’s Dream)
Swagger (A Midsummer Night’s Dream)
Undress (The Taming of the Shrew)