-------- Original Message --------
Piers,
Bottom-feeders!
I imagine he had read Looney.
I wonder whether the word "strange" recurs with some regularity in VN's
work in the vicinity of a Shakespeare allusion; if so, perhaps he was
taking a pot-shot at the Derbyites, whose candidate is William Stanley,
6th Earl of Derby, aka Lord Strange. The argument for Derby predated
that for Vere of Oxford.
Being fallible doesn't mean you're necessarily wrong in any particular
case.
Best,
Michael
------------------------------
Nabokov was fallible and fraught with contradiction, much like everyone
else. That poem echoes Freud's suspicions about WS, which, for me, is
not so much ironic as chthonic (the secret symmetry of the bowels).
Nabokov may have read J. T. Looney's Shakespeare Identified (1920), too.
Best, Piers Smith
From: NABOKV-L <NABOKV-L@HOLYCROSS.EDU>
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Sent: Sunday, 1 July 2012, 20:24
Subject: Re: [NABOKV-L] Pale Fire's "Harfar Baron of Shalksbore"
Thanks. Bend Sinister is next on my reading list. I imagine one needs
to be a hardened Nabokov reader to know how seriously he is to be taken
in any given context. I'm sure you're familiar with his 1924 poem,
translated by his son, which to my mind leaves no doubt about his
sentiments at that time. I mean, a poet who writes this isn't leaving
anything open to interpretation:
"...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 lives in pubs, and died before he could
digest in full his portion of a boar's head)..."
Of course it could be said that VN's rejection of the traditional
attribution in that verse was merely a youthful indiscretion, but the
way he consistently referred back to the matter in his writings thirty
and forty years later suggests that his unease persisted. In Ada he
writes of "Billionaire Bill" and critiques the Droeshout engraving
which prefaces the First Folio; but the very name with which he adorns
his most admired author -- "Billionaire Bill" -- suggests that he had
little to no respect for the man from Stratford, the theatrical
shareholder/moneylender/grain hoarder/real estate speculator which
inspired VN's cynical name for him. I think that he rejected the man
from Stratford, but at the same time made it difficult to see where his
own preferences lay. Perhaps, as you suggest, he simply couldn't
decide. I sympathize.
Mike Marcus