All --
Given the scope of the discussion and the passages cited, I'm surprised that no one has mentioned the Third Song in Astrophil & Stella, which is intricately crafted and a good instance, I think, of Sidney's tendency to work reflections on his aesthetic principles into the argument of a witty love lyric.
Astrophil compares Stella's singing voice and its power to move to Orpheus' voice and Amphion's lyre: "O stones, o trees, learne hearing, Stella singeth." Then he alludes to stories from Pliny, illustrating how birds and beasts can be moved to love human beings. In the last stanza he concedes that Stella's voice and shining beauty have not moved "birds, beasts, stones and trees" to show their love for Stella, but asserts that they have been stunned:
"Know, that small Love is quicke, and great Love doth amaze:
They are amaz'd, but you with reason armed,
O eyes, o eares of men, how are you charmed!"
I take it that to be charmed, as one is by an exemplary "carmen," is a more kinetic and deeper effect than to be amazed. The distinction between "small" and "great" love pulls in a different direction: I don't think "small Love" is to be admired. But reason tempers an excessive love -- or is supposed to. Similar distinctions are at work in the FQ episode on Mt. Acidale.
Jon Quitslund
-------------- Original message ----------------------
From: "James C. Nohrnberg" <[log in to unmask]>
>
> 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
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