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Hello, and welcome to Waxen Hearts.


In Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Viola quickly falls in love with Orsino and bemoans women’s “waxen hearts”, easily impressed by men. Shakespeare plays on the fact that during the early modern period people believed that women’s minds were more impressionable and moldable than those of men. At the same time the woman speaking these lines is, in fact, a boy actor (playing a boy dressed as girl), so this type of woman is indeed a thing purely molded by men. Whilst rejecting the sexist sentiment of “waxen hearts”, I would like to appropriate the phrase to describe how Shakespeare’s language, beautiful in its own right, has been reused and molded to suit the various purposes of his successors.

In this blog I will use (and perhaps misuse) language and moments from Shakespeare’s plays to suit my mood.






Thomasin Bailey & Shakespeare
Photograph by Peter Marsh at ashmorevisuals.

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