‘[A] form in wax, / By him imprinted’

Chapter 3, "'[A] form in wax, / By him imprinted': Sealing and poetics in A Midsummer Night's Dream", explores the relationship between rhetorical figures and sigillographic figures (or seal-impressions) in Dream. It considers the role of figuration, disfiguration and transfiguration in the play's interrogation into the nature and effect of poetry. The recurring image of the wax 'figure', the chapter argues, acts as a site of intersection for ideas of erotic and rhetorical transmission that are essential to the language and action of the play, and which have played a dominant role in critics' understanding of Shakespearean poetics as fertile, transformative and impressive.