Brian ~~Boyd~~ ( to Mike Marcus: As an admirer of Nabokov and Shakespeare--who I have no doubt was Edward de Vere--I too am curious about VN's exact views on the authorship question...

Jansy Mello: For Mike Marcus's collection on "Vere" and "Verre", from PNIN:
"... Look at it! Look at this writhing pattern. You know, you should show it to the Cockerells. They know everything about old glass. In fact, they have a Lake Dunmore pitcher that looks like a poor relation of this.'
Margaret Thayer admired it in her turn, and said that when she was a child, she imagined Cinderella's glass shoes to be exactly of that greenish blue tint; whereupon Professor Pain remarked that, primo, he would like everybody to say if contents were as good as container, and, secundo, that Cendrillon's shoes were not made of glass but of Russian squirrel fur — vair, in French. It was, he said, an obvious case of the survival of the fittest among words, verre being more evocative than vair which, he submitted, came not from varius, variegated, but from veveritsa, Slavic for a certain beautiful, pale, winter-squirrel fur, having a bluish, or better say sizïy, columbine, shade — 'from columba, Latin for "pigeon ", as somebody here well knows — so you see, Mrs Fire, you were, in general, correct.'
'The contents are fine,' said Laurence Clements.
'This beverage is certainly delicious,' said Margaret Thayer.
('I always thought "columbine" was some sort of flower,' said Thomas to Betty, who lightly acquiesced*.)

* Alexey Sklyarenko wrote about "irises" and I suppose he is indicating the flower called "Iris" and not the "harlequin" prismatic effect, with a similar double meaning (the columba=dove and the columbine=flower besides the name Cinderella, related to cinders and the color gray/vair)
In his memoir essay The Literary Evening at P. A. Pletnyov's (1869) Turgenev describes Pletnyov's guests and mentions the so-called "harlequin" (of different colors) irises of one of them: адъютант в жандармском мундире, белокурый, плотный мужчина с разноцветными (так называемыми арлекинскими) зрачками