Subject
Re: Nabokov an anti-Stratfordian? (fwd)
From
Date
Body
From: sam schuman <schumans@CAA.MRS.UMN.EDU>
I am inclined to agree that VN toyed with anti-Stratfordianism. Perhaps the
strongest statement of this notion is in the 1924 poem "Shakespeare." As
translated by Dmitri Nabokov, the concluding portion of the second verse
paragraph of that poem reads:
You are among us, you're alive; your name, though,
your image, too -- deceiving, thus, the world --
you have submerged in your beloved Lethe.
It's true, of course, a usurer had grown
accustomed, for a sum, to sign your work
(that Shakespeare -- Will -- who played the Ghost in HAMLET,
who lived in pubs, and died before he could
digest in full his portion of a boar's head)...
In its claim of a submerged identity, of course, this is far from an endorsement
of the authorship of Oxford. My major graduate professor, the late Samuel
Schoenbaum, wrote the definitive - and hysterically funny - history of
Shakespeare biography (Stratfordian and anti-Stratfordian) SHAKESPEARE'S LIVES.
Sam
Samuel Schuman
Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs
and Dean
University of Minnesota, Morris
SCHUMANS@CAA.MRS.UMN.EDU
320-589-6015
I am inclined to agree that VN toyed with anti-Stratfordianism. Perhaps the
strongest statement of this notion is in the 1924 poem "Shakespeare." As
translated by Dmitri Nabokov, the concluding portion of the second verse
paragraph of that poem reads:
You are among us, you're alive; your name, though,
your image, too -- deceiving, thus, the world --
you have submerged in your beloved Lethe.
It's true, of course, a usurer had grown
accustomed, for a sum, to sign your work
(that Shakespeare -- Will -- who played the Ghost in HAMLET,
who lived in pubs, and died before he could
digest in full his portion of a boar's head)...
In its claim of a submerged identity, of course, this is far from an endorsement
of the authorship of Oxford. My major graduate professor, the late Samuel
Schoenbaum, wrote the definitive - and hysterically funny - history of
Shakespeare biography (Stratfordian and anti-Stratfordian) SHAKESPEARE'S LIVES.
Sam
Samuel Schuman
Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs
and Dean
University of Minnesota, Morris
SCHUMANS@CAA.MRS.UMN.EDU
320-589-6015