-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [Fwd: Ben Wright in Ada]
Date: Mon, 13 Aug 2012 15:34:44 -0700
From: Mike Marcus <mmkcm@COMCAST.NET>
To: <NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>
CC: Mike Marcus <mmkcm@COMCAST.NET>


Mike M replies:

I already have a few notes on Ben Wright not submitted at the time of my first posting. Our introduction to BW, an English coachman, is his drinking ale, probably an allusion to Jonson and Shakespeare making merry in the Mermaid Tavern (a fairy tale). A bit later he's asleep in his cart "under the low-hanging festoons of foliage". That reminds me of Davenant's poem, "In remembrance of Mr William Shakespeare", ".......Each tree, whose thick and spreading growth hath made, / Rather a night beneath the boughs than shade, / Unwilling now to grow,...." (see below for complete poem). Jonson is in the shade, someone's shade anyhow, maybe John's shade.

Later still he gets fired for letting "winds go free". Of course that's all about Vere & his fart. Nabokov transposes people & the events associated with them regularly, makes deliberate errors, etc. For example, he says that Vere de Vere was three years older than Van, also (I think) that Percy de Prey was three years older than Van. But Vere Earl of Oxford was four years older than Philip Sidney (that's not three rounded up to four, it's four and some months, so a legitimate four).

Wright's attempted rape of Blanche is an allusion to Jonson's 'Every Man Out of His Humour'. Nabokov here uses 'rape' for theft. In EMO, there are long and tortuous passages about the theft of a dog, which itself is a metaphor for a play (editors think it's about the theft of a dog), some groom (supposed by anti-Stratfordians to be the actor Shaksper from Stratford) who has been assigned custody of the "dog") etc. I'm not going to do all the work, the play is extant.

There's what appears to be a nifty allusion to another of the claimants for the authorship of the Shakespeare canon in the last sentence of that episode: "D'ailleurs, it was Mr Ben Wright's last petard at Ardis". In 1943 Alden Brooks wrote a book called 'Will Shakspere and the Dyer's Hand', promoting Philip Sidney's friend/mentor Edward Dyer as the bard. D'aiileurs = Dyer.

Petard is an anagram of depart, which is what Wright did. Too easy though.

The only thing I can think to add is the two attempts at spelling the name of the emissary Voltimand/Voltemand. Nobody really knows how the first, seemingly very abbreviated first quarto of Hamlet came into existence. One theory is that the actor who played Voltemand had memorized parts of the play, and the most consistently accurate were Vs own lines and those surrounding them, thus he was the 'pirate'. Come to think of it, that's no help at all.

I do see Hamlet's advice to the players there. Just before that is what I assume is an allusion to Bosch (Bosh). But the timing is off, since Bosch painted around 1500, and we are now in the very late 1800s ("three hundred years later"). Is van Gogh a "poppy group pup"? In any case, again it's the late 1800s, so ought to be 400 years. Nabokov juggles his threes and fours sometimes, as with the disparity in Vere's age vis-à-vis Sidney.

However, on occasion he's deadly accurate, within the parameters of his proprietary time-shifting. On the third & fourth pages of Ada is a report of Dan's proposal to Marina (1871), and Van and Ada's discovery; deduct 300 years, and see how events correlate with Sidney & Vere and the woman, Anne Cecil, to whom the former was engaged and the latter married. Again, I'm not going to lay this out in full, the background is readily available. You do need to make allowances for Nabokov's mischief making. Well, ok, the bit at the end. Vere was about 16 months in Italy, was notified in his absence that his wife was pregnant but he disavowed parentage, presumably on the basis of his suspicion that he hadn't slept with his wife at the right time. Anne herself was petrified, she concealed knowledge of the pregnancy for five days, was fearful that her husband would not "pass" on her or the child. Queen Elizabeth became involved, Burghley asked the Queen "either to reveal it or to keep it and lose". Whatever the actual facts, something was fishy, and Burghley was unnerved. He wrote a memo for himself about the chronology, this part about Vere: "He confessed to my Lord Howard that he lay not with his wife but at Hampton Court, and that then the child could not be his because the child was born in July which was not the space of twelve months". One Oxfordian commentator observes: "As it stands, this is plain nonsense. The time from the stay at Hampton Court to the birth was precisely the normal nine months; and only a lunatic could think twelve months necessary .... Cecil's jotting was designed to serve his own memory, and not to give himself away...Cecil had but to insert an opportune "not" to make the note unintelligible to others..."('Lord Burghley in Shakespeare' by G. W. Phillips, 1936). The date of that mnemonic note was January 3rd, 1576.

MM

Complete poem by Davenant:
"Beware delighted poets when you sing / To welcome nature in the early spring, / Your numerous feet not tread / The banks of Avon: for each flower, / As it ne'er knew a sun or shower, / Hangs there the pensive head. / Each tree, whose thick and spreading growth hath made, / Rather a night beneath the boughs than shade, / Unwilling now to grow, / Looks like the plume a captain wears, / Whose rifled falls are steeped i'the tears / Which from his last rage flow. / The piteous river wept itself away, / Long since alas! to such a swift decay / That reach the map and look / If you a river there can spy, / And for a river your mocked eye / Will find a shallow brook."

In other words, don't waste your time looking for Shakespeare in Stratford.


---------------
Jansy Mello: Two more quotes for Mike M to work upon, and a question: does "Ben" really indicate Ben Jonson? How can we interpret VN's use of this name close to his own "Sirin" (with an added "e", like in Botkin/Botkine, following a transliteration from the Arab).

The quote that distinguishes "puzzled Will" from a "more normal" Chekov doesn't make any deliberate pun concerning the word "playwright,"but a rhyme with "right"

Darkbloom's note on "petard" (aimed at Ardis) may be misleading. Petard also means an explosive device, fireworks and, even, in soccer slang used somewhere, a particularly strong quick to the ball.

Mike M. might be interested in the relation between Van Veen and Voltemand (Letters from Terra) with references to Hamlet, while he meets Lucette.


(Ada): ‘I seem to have always felt, for example, that acting should be focused not on "characters," not on "types" of something or other, not on the fokus-pokus of a social theme, but exclusively on the subjective and unique poetry of the author, because playwrights, as the greatest among them has shown, are closer to poets than to novelists. In "real" life we are creatures of chance in an absolute void — unless we be artists ourselves, naturally; but in a good play I feel authored, I feel passed by the board of censors, I feel secure, with only a breathing blackness before me (instead of our Fourth-Wall Time), I feel cuddled in the embrace of puzzled Will (he thought I was you) or in that of the much more normal Anton Pavlovich, who was always passionately fond of long dark hair.’

p.316. petard: Mr Ben Wright, a poet in his own right, is associated throughout with pets (farts).


Herr Mispel, who liked to air his authors, discerned in Letters from Terra the influence of Osberg (Spanish writer of pretentious fairy tales and mystico-allegoric anecdotes, highly esteemed by short-shift thesialists) as well as that of an obscene ancient Arab, expounder of anagrammatic dreams, Ben Sirine, thus transliterated by Captain de Roux, according to Burton in his adaptation of Nefzawi’s treatise on the best method of mating with obese or hunchbacked females (The Perfumed Garden, Panther edition, p.187, a copy given to ninety-three-year-old Baron Van Veen by his ribald physician Professor Lagosse). His critique ended as follows: ‘If Mr Voltemand (or Voltimand or Mandalatov) is a psychiatrist, as I think he might be, then I pity his patients, while admiring his talent.’



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