Shakespeare Playing Cards
The Elizabethans believed people to be controlled by the balance of the four humours inside of them- blood, black bile, yellow bile and phlegm. Passionate and overzealous people were believed to have a larger proportion of blood than usual and were “sanguine“. “Melancholics“, had too much black bile in their system and would be prone to brooding and sadness. “Choleric“ people- yellow bile- were said to be often angry, jealous and proud. The “phlegmatic“ were predominantly passive and self-indulgent. In Shakespeare’s plays, black bile fills Hamlet with despair, Iago, a creature of yellow bile, lives in a perpetual state of envy and spite, Cleopatra’s boundless and breathtaking energy comes of her blood, and Gertrude, preferring to be blind and happy than to see is rotten in Denmark, is phlegmatic. When they face enemy troops, the humours are the difference between the gloomy and retiring Richard II and the frenzied Richard III, and Leontes might have been cured of his jealous mania by a good bloodletting.
In the deck of cards I’ve designed, the characters have been organised in suits according to their temperaments such that the king, queen and jack of hearts are sanguine, the spades are choleric, the diamonds, phlegmatic and the clubs melancholic. The drawings were made with coffee, ink, squashed berries and a black pen. I wrote a description of the process of making them here.
