Johnson defines Frenzy to be
"Madness; distraction of mind; alienation of understanding; any violent passion approaching to madness."
and surely Angelo's violent passion for Isabella, and his determination to gratify it at all risks, may, properly be said to approach to madness.
W. G. M.
There is a Scotch word so nearly resembling this, and at the same time so exactly answering to the sense which the passage in Measure for Measure requires, that it may be worth while calling the attention of the Shakspearian commentators to it. In Allan Cunningham's Glossary to Burns, I find Primsie, which he defines to mean demure, precise. An old Scotch proverb is quoted, in which the word is used:
"A primsie damsel makes a laidlae dame."
The term is evidently connected with, or formed from, the English prim, which has the same sense. It seems this was formerly sometimes written prin. Halliwell cites from Fletcher's poems the lines—
"He looks as gaunt and prin, as he that spent
A tedious twelve years in an eager Lent."
Now if from prim be formed the secondary adjective primsie, so from prin we get prinsie or prinzie. But without resorting to the supposition of the existence of this latter word, it is evident that in primzie, which does or did exist, we have a word answering all the conditions laid down by LEGES for determining the true reading, more nearly than any other that has been suggested.