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
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James Nohrnberg
Dept. of English, Bryan Hall 219
Univ. of Virginia
P.O Box 400121
Charlottesville, VA 22904-4121
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