Abstract
This chapter takes up woman and wax to show how wax was used to figure binary gender difference by implying that women were soft, malleable, and easily imprinted by the pressure of a hard, impervious, and masculine signet. The chapter begins with Swetnam the Woman-Hater to show how strongly women were associated with wax in the period. It then turns to Shakespeare’s Rape of Lucrece, Twelfth Night, and Love’s Labour’s Lost to argue that Shakespeare uses the signet–seal trope in ways that disrupt those gender binaries.
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Maxwell, L.M. (2019). Wax Seals: Gendered Relations in Shakespeare. In: Wax Impressions, Figures, and Forms in Early Modern Literature. Early Modern Cultural Studies 1500–1700. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16932-9_2
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