Penny wrote:

 

I really meant that Nabokov is making an allusion (just as Thomas Nashe used to do to great effect: (‘hast never heard of Will Monox. and his great dagger?’)) by conflating ideas from a Shakespeare play, to give us a clue.  But even your ‘surely’, to point to what you think is obvious, is doubtful: Andrew Hadfield has suggested that ‘take arms against a sea of troubles/ And by opposing, end them’ might well argue that Hamlet is here considering killing Claudius (?with a dagger?) which would pretty quickly entail his own death. It’s a very plausible reading, in the context – ‘whether  . . in the mind to suffer/ Or . . .’. ‘Bare’ might mean ‘mere’; or it might not.

 

This comment rather puzzles me. Andrew Hadfield is a new name to me: he is well after my time, and I haven’t read him, though I see he is a literary critic of great eminence and  authority. However, it has been reasonably obvious to me for the last 45 years, since university days, that Hamlet’s soliloquy is an expression of his inner thoughts on at least three or four or even more matters of concern to him. As I mentioned to Penny on 2/12/06, I mentioned this in my post of 12/11/2006:

 

The most famous soliloquy in Northern literature is usually interpreted as solely a meditation on suicide. However, also present in Hamlet's troubled mind are thoughts of revenge by murder, as well as his sense of sexual frustration and/or disgust.

 

Perhaps I wasn’t making myself plain enough. Hamlet’s sea of troubles include:

 

The possibility that his father has been murdered by his uncle Claudius

The usurpation of the throne (perhaps his by right) by Claudius

His replacement, as he sees it, in his mother’s affections by that same Claudius

His desire for revenge, and how it is to be accomplished

His sense of frustration in his dealings with Ophelia: has she rejected his advances?

The fact that members of the Court are spying on him, testing him, humouring him

His sense of political impotence

His inability to resolve these matters by taking action

 

Killing Claudius would not “entail his own death”, quickly or otherwise. Hamlet’s concern is with his own conscience, and possible eventual retribution in an afterlife, not in the Danish Court. The moral  legitimacy of revenge was a major theme in tragedy of Shakespeare’s era. His problems with Ophelia are never specified, but they might be resolved by taking her either by force, or by seduction: or else he feels a post-coital melancholy --- we are not told. They may be purely a sense of disgust with women in general, as exemplified for him by his mother’s conduct. His resolution of his feelings for his mother are too taboo to be contemplated, but I go along with the Freud, Ernest Jones, Olivier reading. Finally, he could terminate the whole turmoil by terminating himself, but that is also forbidden since the canon against self-slaughter had been equally fixed.

 

The “consummation”, the “quietus”, the “bodkin”: all three words carry multiple senses for all these problems. Sex and violence. The words are deliberately chosen for the ambiguities of their interpretation: the audience can make of them what best suits them, but it is precisely this richness of possible interpretation which has fascinated audiences for 400 years. “Bare” merely amplifies the ambiguity. "To be or not to be", in English, carries two senses.

 

It is difficult to know precisely what “clue” Nabokov is giving us by “conflating ideas”, which seem to me to be limited to the mention of “bodkin” or “botkin”. I do feel that too much is being made of the belief that there is some pat final inner solution to the whole content of Pale Fire; and that an ultimate explanation of the book, in those terms, is about as likely as a conclusive reading of a painting by Magritte or de Chirico, Chagall or Braque, or even Dali.

 

Charles