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Ken Gross is surely right, re amazement/mazedness. Shakespeare is full of examples. "Distraction, frenzy, and amazement, / Like witless antics, one another meet" (King John 5.3.85). Reverting to the citation of The Tempest, consider Ariel: In every cabin I flamed amazement (1.2.298) -- this soon after Prospero's command, "Be collected; no more amazement" (1.2.14); and much before Gonzalo's All torment, trouble, wonder, and amazement Inhabits here: some heavenly power guide us Out of this fearful country! (5.1.104-06) This is to be read with with the original citations from the same text: Here's a maze trod indeed Through forth-rights and meanders (3.3.2) This is as strange a maze as e'er men trod (5.1.242) "Mazed" of course was a word (i.e., a verb-form) itself (for Milton and Spenser), presumably the original form, if its meaning projects into our notion of being amazed in the mentalizing sense of wellnigh nonplussed -- "many mazed considerings did throng / And pressed in" (Henry VIII 2.4.185) = "why / Stands Macbeth thus amazedly?" (Macbeth 4.1.126) = "I shall reply amazedly, / Half asleep..." (MNDream 4.1.151f). In passing: Chaucer spells amazed 'amased,' and maze he spells 'mase' (as in his description of the prison in which the Minotaur is more or less caged): ... the hous is crynkled to and fro, And hath so queynte weyes for to go-- For it is shapen as the mase is wroght-- = Phedra describing the labyrinth in Legend of Ariadne (LGW, 2012ff). Her scheme for confounding the beast is also Angelica's, when, at Boiardo's Castle Cruel, Fortune "has provided no means for [Ranaldo's] escape" (Orlando Innamorato, 1.9.13); she lends the unfortunate Ranaldo the help he needs--Crazy Glue chewing-gum, corresponding to Chaucer's "balles ... Of wexe and towe ... To sleke his [= the Minotaur's] hunger and encombre his teeth." See also the story of Daniel, Bel and the Dragon in the den in "Daniel 14," vs. 27: "Then Daniel took pitch, fat, and hair, and boiled them together and made cakes, which he fed to the dragon" -- like Error in the labyrinthine wood in FQ I.i, "The dragon ... burst open." The monster-killing Theseus has Minos' commission, as Daniel has the Babylonian king's, and as Recrosse has Allegloriana's. (This is the Spenserlist, after all ... .) -- Jim N. On Tue, 29 May 2007 08:58:21 -0400 Kenneth Gross <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > One minor resonance: I'd think that both Milton and Spenser, given their > labyrinthine preoccupations (in relation to both imaginary spaces and the > movment of their own twisting and untwisting verse lines) would have been > more liable than most to hear the transitive form of "maze" in "amaze" or > "amazement." > > Ken Gross [log in to unmask] James Nohrnberg Dept. of English, Bryan Hall 219 Univ. of Virginia P.O Box 400121 Charlottesville, VA 22904-4121