-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Shakespeare connection, part IV - Pale Fire
Date: Fri, 27 Jul 2012 11:21:51 -0700
From: Mike Marcus <mmkcm@COMCAST.NET>
To: <NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>
CC: Mike Marcus <mmkcm@COMCAST.NET>

Mike M writes:

Does anyone know who Paul H. Jr might be? Is there any connection between him and Paul Hentzner? Here are CK's comments:

"Lines 376-377: was said in English Litt to be
This is replaced in the draft by the more significant - and more tuneful - variant:

the Head of our Department deemed
***
Although it may be taken to refer to the man (whoever he was) who occupied this post at the time Hazel Shade was a student, the reader cannot be blamed for applying it to Paul H., Jr., the fine administrator and inept scholar who since 1957 headed the English Department of Wordsmith College. We met now and then (see Foreword and note to line 894) but not often. The Head of the Department to which I belonged was Prof. Nattochdag - "Netochka" as we called the dear man. Certainly the migraines that have lately tormented me to such a degree that I once had to leave in the midst of a concert at which I happened to be sitting beside Paul H., Jr., should not have been a stranger's business."

The migraines (plural) are reminiscent of Macbeth -- like Charles K, a man with delusions of majesty -- when he's under great stress at the banquet:
"Then comes my fit again" (III, iv, 20).
Charles is at a concert and has to leave, Lady Macbeth takes her husband aside from the banquet at which the ghost of Banquo appears.

Charles' parenthetical note states: "(see Foreword and note to line 894)". A 1950 book called "The Royal Play of Macbeth" claims that the play was written in haste by Shakespeare for the visit of James I's brother-in-law, the King of Denmark, in 1606, in order to flatter the king of England. An essay by historian Michael Hastings in a book called "Focus on Macbeth" tears the argument to ribbons, since (amongst other reasons) Scotland is treated in the play as barbaric. "The Royal Play of Macbeth" was written by Henry N. Paul, who could be Paul H. Jr, the inept scholar, seated next to Charles at the concert. Paul, as was pointed out in a review of his book in the R.E.S., was an amateur scholar, being a lawyer by profession, and his shortcomings were highlighted in the review. So he might well have been the "fine administrator and inept scholar". Fast forward to the note to line 894:

"... and two local characters, one being the slapdash disheveled hag who ladles out the mash in the Levin Hall cafeteria."
"The third in the witch row," I precised quaintly, and everybody laughed."

"... disheveled hag .... third ... witch" = Macbeth's three witches, also called "midnight hags" (IV, i, 48). A bit later in the note, Shade asks Charles if the name 'kinbote' doesn't mean "regicide" in his language -- yet another Macbeth theme. In which case, Charles is nominally a regicide, i.e. Macbeth himself, the king with the migraine, the regicide with King Duncan as his victim. Whom does Charles wish to dethrone? Shade? As Charles himself writes elsewhere, "The one who kills is always his victim's inferior."

Now to the Foreword, the second alleged reference to Paul H. Jr. Given that Paul H. Jr is an inept scholar, by a process of elimination he appears to be the the "Prof. H", whose potential collaboration with "Prof. C." Charles views with skepticism as co-editors of Shade's manuscript. I pointed out in an earlier post that these "professors" allude to Heminges & Condell, the alleged 'editors' of Shakespeare's First Folio, who as minimally educated actors would have been unqualified for that task. So there does seem to be a continuing Shakespeare thread in play. Does Macbeth figure specifically, though? Taking up the note to lines 376-77 which were quoted at the start, we read:

"They apparently were, very much so. He kept his eye on me, and immediately upon John Shade's demise circulated a mimeographed letter that began:

Several members of the Department of English are painfully concerned over the fate of a manuscript poem, or parts of a manuscript poem, left by the late John Shade. The manuscript fell into the hands of a person who not only is unqualified for the job of editing it, belonging as he does to another department, but is known to have a deranged mind. One wonders whether some legal action, etc."

So yet again the editorial work associated with a possibly incomplete manuscript enters the frame. It is admitted by all that Macbeth as we have it is mutilated, and has been completed by a hand other than Shakespeare's -- Middleton is the candidate du jour. Of course any number of Shakespeare plays were not entirely his own work, so the direct allusion to Macbeth is weakened, though not to Shakespeare.

What about Paul Hentzner, who knew "the names of things"? There was a real Paul Hentzner, tutor to a German nobleman, who visited England in 1598, right in the middle of the Shakespeare period, and wrote quite extensively about the trip. He commented about London theater, among other things, including a place of entertainment thought by some to be the Globe theater. In the long note to line 894, CK mentions a "visiting German lecturer from Oxford", so that could relate, tangentially, to Hentzner. Later in the note the German drifts back in:
""Strange, strange," said the German visitor, who by some quirk of alderwood ancestry had been alone to catch the eerie note that had throbbed by and was gone."
Alder wood is associated with witchcraft; "ancestry" implies that his forebears were witches -- yet a further connection to Macbeth, as is the "eerie note". Migraine is again referenced through "throbbed".

The note continues:
"Shade [smiling and massaging my knee]: "Kings do not die - they only disappear, eh, Charles?"
"Who said that?" asked sharply, as if coming out of a trance, the ignorant, and always suspicious, Head of the English Department. "
The trance reminds one of Lady Macbeth, who in Act V, scene i, appears in a trance, carrying a candle. Suspicion is a sub-theme in Macbeth. These words are presumably spoken by Paul H Jr.

So much for Shakespeare. Returning to Paul Hentzner; could Paul H Jr be his son? Kinbote tells us that Paul (senior?) "pleased John Shade much better than the suburban refinements of the English Department." -- perhaps the kind of place where his son worked? The chronology is deficient given that Hentzner's wife left him in 1950 with his son, presumably a child. 1950 seems to be a significant date in Pale Fire.

The original Paul Hentzner perhaps visited the Globe Theatre in 1598; a London theatre, at any rate. In Pale Fire he had a barn. Hazel "spent three nights / Investigating certain sounds and lights / In an old barn". Perhaps barn is a metaphor for theater. In 1576 James Burbage, father of the famous Shakespearean actor Richard Burbage leased some buildings remaining after the destruction of Holywell Priory, including one called the Great Barn, and this spot was the venue of the first fixed Elizabethan theatre, in Shoreditch, called simply The Theatre. It was later demolished and its material used to construct the Globe. In 1956 Hazel busied herself with the barn, and the note to line 347 ("old barn") supplies two versions of events. One was that the disturbance might have emanated from "an outraged ghost or a rejected swain" -- both theatrical clichés, swain having a period ring to it. The second version emerges from Jane P, as a proxy for what would have been Shade's own re!
port, had Charles not preempted him: ".. made me regret that I prevented him from getting to the point he was confusedly and self-consciously making (for as I have said in an earlier note, he never cared to refer to his dead child) by filling in a welcome pause with an extraordinary episode from the history of Onhava University. That episode took place in the year of grace 1876. But to return to Hazel Shade...". That episode is never referred to again. Between 1876 and 1576 is a gap of 300 years, which seems to be significant both here and in Ada (that will have to wait). For example, Hentzner was "a throwback to the "curious Germans" who three centuries ago had been the fathers of the first great naturalists." Jane P's version incorporated "theatrical ululations and flashes". Hazel's second visit followed her failure to be accompanied by two brothers: "She tells me she suggested that the White twins (nice fraternity boys accepted by the Shades) would come instead." If this!
passage is indeed redolent of Shakespeare, the Whites would be the brothers Francis and Anthony Bacon (white because the Bacon family lived in St. Albans). Later, Hazel "wanted her parents to witness the "talking light" with her"; the light didn't show up, but Charles notifies us that it did reappear, transformed, in the poem containing the lines "And maybe Shakespeare floods a whole / Town with innumerable lights".



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