Jansy  wrote

 

Hamlet and Danish verbal instruments abound in B.S, since "As with all decadent democracies, everybody in the Denmark of the play suffers from a plethora of words". [The words are mainly Nabokov's, quoted from Bend Sinister.]

 

From the "plethora of words" we reach "an Englishman whose domed head had been a hive of words; a man who had only to breathe on any particle of his sutendous vocabulary to have that particle live and expand..." and to another man, three centuries later, in another country "trying to render these rhythms and metaphors in a different tongue".

 

Now I will have to read BS again, since I'd forgotten it. There is quite a long discussion of Hamlet in James Joyce also, but I can't remember if it's in Ulysses or Portrait of the Artist.

 

Would one describe VN as having a domed head?

 

Would one describe the Court at Elsinore as a "decadent democracy"?  Sounds rather like Oscar Wilde, talking about quite another country.

 

Charles

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