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Mike M writes:
Some corrections to my post on Kim B, as well as several corroborative
points.
I made a hash of Marlowe's biography as it related to his alleged
killer, Frizer. The latter worked not for Francis Walsingham
(spymaster, dead by 1593) but for his nephew or cousin, Thomas. Though
Thomas had been involved in espionage nothing connects Frizer to that
line of work.
However, I forgot to mention a key factor that cements the
identification of Kim with Marlowe. In 2, 7 Ada opens Kim's photo album
"at one of its maroon markers meaningly inserted here and there". This
is a cute allusion, since this brief passage is itself a marker,
purposefully introduced in this very spot. "Mar"-oon and "mar"-ker are
both clues to "Mar-lowe", here "meaningly inserted". Nabokov here gives
the reader a shake and says "open your eyes!"
Earlier in 2. 7, Kim is said to speak "a thick Creole". I only ever saw
one signature written by Marlowe, and there he spelled his name Marley.
I don't know whether the chronology will support it (Ada publ. 1969)
but the reggae singer Bob Marley used Jamaican Creole. This is probably
a bizarre coincidence.
Kim also shows up in the words Akimovich as well as Yakim Eskimossoff,
probably not coincidentally.
His surname, Beauharnais. Mrs Napoleon? Why? Well, there was another
Beauharnais, Hortense, Josephine's daughter by her first husband.
Married Napoleon's son Louis (I think) and thus became queen of
Holland. Still looks like a dead end, but better to mention it that
treading water.
In other news, same chapter, Ben Wright trying to rape Blanche "in the
mews" probably alludes to Ben Jonson's play BartholoMEW Fair.
MM