Subject
Re: Seeking information on Nabokov's poem "Shakespeare" (1924)?
From
Date
Body
My humble spin, in the form of a reductio-ad-ridiculorum:
Anyone cranky-daft, Looney [sic] enough to dogmatically pick de Vere from
the long list of Bardic candidates without a deep and careful study of
Elizabethan English and Drama, and the very meaning of authorship (including
deVere¹s own published verse!) is also likely to ridicule Einstein¹s Theory
of Relativity with absolutely no knowledge of the mathematical physics
involved.
Coda: Einstein did indeed make many famous errors. When corrected by his
peers, he acknowledged his mistakes, but added the claim:
I¹ve earned the right to be wrong!
(See e.g., Jim Baggott¹s The Quantum Story: A History in 40 Moments).
VN, the great novelist/memoirist, has earned similar rights.
I swore many years ago, when living near Stratford-on-Avon and long
over-exposed to the Oxfordian-authorship pros/cons, NEVER EVER to re-enter
the fray. It¹s not strictly decidable in any mathematical-logical sense
(like squaring circles!). Any finite string of cherry-picked evidence for or
against can be refuted to the satisfaction of the dissenter.
A typical example: only an Earl could know the courtly protocols. To which
comes the rebuttal: only a glove-maker¹s son could know that trade¹s jargon,
and indeed reel off so accurately the peasants¹ vulgar sayings.
In the absence of Popperian falsibility, we leave proper¹ science, and
assess what¹s plausible. Here comes the big block to Oxfordianism: WHY?
De Vere did not hide his own authorship; he had no shame about being
associated with the theatre, being both patron and company owner.
The identity switch demands a huge conspiracy, not to mention the plays
usually dated after de Vere¹s death. To the various explanations, I invoke
Occam¹s Razor. But ... I¹m breaking my vow of silence.
Stan Kelly-Bootle
author: MUSE (Most Unusual Shakespearean Engine) or Killing Two Bards With
One Brick ... proving that Shakespeare invented the first computer on which
he composed his plays. The primitive disks were certainly made of Arden
oak:
OR CRAM WITHIN THIS WOODEN O!
(More in my Computer Contradictionary, MIT Press, 1995)
On 24/04/2012 03:59, "Vladimir Mylnikov" <vmylnikov@YAHOO.COM> wrote:
> a russian scholar gililov has some strong points regarding the bard - vn
> probably would support his theory
> vladimir m.
>
> From: piano forte <pianissimo.nyc@GMAIL.COM>
> To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
> Sent: Monday, April 23, 2012 4:48 PM
> Subject: [NABOKV-L] Seeking information on Nabokov's poem "Shakespeare"
> (1924)?
>
>
> The birthday of Nabokov and Shakespeare seems a good time to ask what VN could
> have intended by the verse below, if not to express grave doubts about the
> Bard's true identity.
>
> Does anyone on the list have any information on this early poem, which
> describes Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, with astonishing clarity?
>
> If Nabokov believed William of Stratford wrote the immortal plays and poems,
> why would Dmitri, who jealously guarded his father's reputation, permit this
> verse to be "reprinted...with his kind permission" in the Shakespeare Oxford
> Society Newsletter?
>
> Brian
>
>
> NABOKOV'S PREMONITION
>
> Ever Reader (No. 9, Summer/Fall 1999) | Ever Reader Home Page
> Vladimir Nabokov and William Shakespeare by Philip F Howerton, Jr.
>
>
------------------------------------------------------------------------------>
-
> This article was first published in the Winter 1990 Shakespeare Oxford
> Society Newsletter.
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Vladimir Nabokov, the great Russian/American writer, was born on April
> 22, 1899, in St. Petersburg, Russia. In 1914 he published his first
> work, a small book of poems in a lilac folder. It carried an epigraph
> from Romeo and Juliet. At the time of his death in 1977, he left
> behind an enormous oeuvre which included, in the opinion of many, some
> of the finest novels in Russian and English written in this century.
> Alfred Appel, a Nabokovian scholar, has said that "although the
> problem has not yet been submitted to a composer, Shakespeare would
> seem to be the writer Nabokov invokes most frequently in his novels in
> English." Nabokov himself once said that the "verbal poetical texture
> of Shakespeare is the greatest the world has known."
>
> Nabokov, whom Time magazine in 1969 called "The greatest
> living American novelist," was also a professor of literature for
> twenty years. While at Cornell he published his literal translation of
> Eugene Onegin in four volumes, together with almost nine hundred pages
> of seminal notes (over thirty references to Shakespeare) and his
> "Notes on Prosody." The latter was a book-length "outline of the
> differences and similarities" between English and Russian iambic
> tetrameters and revealed an astonishing knowledge of English as well
> as Russian poetry.
>
> In 1947 Nabokov published a bitterly satirical novel about
> totalitarianism called Bend Sinister. In Chapter Seven he took the
> opportunity (which has puzzled scholars ever since) to make the
> following, apparently ironical, comments about the Stratfordian
> attribution:
>
> "A fluted glass with a blue-veined violet and a jug of hot punch stand
> on Ember's bedtable. The buff wall directly above his bed (he has a
> bad cold) bears a sequence of three engravings.
>
> Number one represents a sixteenth-century gentleman in the act of
> handing a book to a humble fellow who holds a spear and a bay-crowned
> hat in his left hand. Note the sinistral detail (why? Ah, "that is the
> question," as Monsieur Homais once remarked, quoting le journal d'hier
> a question which is answered in a wooden voice by the Portrait on the
> title page of the First Folio). Note also the legend: "Ink, a Drug."
> Somebody's idle pencil (Ember highly treasures this scholium) has
> numbered the letters so as to spell Grudinka which means "bacon' in
> several Slavic languages.
>
> Number two shows the rustic (now clad in the clothes of the gentleman)
> removing from the head of the gentleman (now writing at a desk) a kind
> of shapska. Scribbled underneath in the same hand: "Ham-let, or
> Home-lette au Lard."
>
> Finally, number three has a road, traveler on foot (wearing the stolen
> shapska) and a road sign 'To High Wycombe."
>
> His name is protean. He begets doubles at every comer. His penmanship
> is unconsciously faked by lawyers who happen to write a similar hand.
> On the wet morning of November 27, 1582, he is Shaxpere and she is a
> Wately of Temple Grafton. A couple of days later he is Shagsper and
> she is a Hathaway of Stratford-on-Avon. Who is he? William X,
> cunningly composed of two left arms and a mask. Who else? The person
> who said (not for the first time) that the glory of God is to hide a
> thing, and the glory of man is to find it. However, the fact that the
> Warwickshire fellow wrote the plays is most satisfactorily proved on
> the strength of an applejohn and a pale primrose."
>
> Several Stratfordian academics have suggested privately, in response
> to queries, that Nabokov's assertion in Bend Sinister that "the fact
> that the Warwickshire follow wrote the plays is most satisfactorily
> proved on the strength of an applejohn and a pale primrose," may be
> taken at face value. Citing Caroline Spurgeon's Shakespeare's Imagery
> as a possible source, it is suggested that Nabokov may have felt that
> only someone familiar with the particular fauna and flora of
> Warwickshire could have written the plays. Nabokov, the argument
> presumably goes, subscribed to a theory which says, in effect, that
> because of his "genius" Shaksper was able to acquire by some sort of
> mysterious osmosis a thorough familiarity with court affairs and
> international politics, medicine and anatomy, law, music, birds,
> falconry, hunting, sailing, warfare, French, Latin, Greek, the
> environs of Italy, and more, but, by Golly, he had to be from
> Warwickshire to know that applejohns and primroses existed in England!
>
> Could such a man as Nabokov (who, by the way, was an accomplished
> naturalist) have really believed (for starters) that applejohns and
> primroses were not only endemic to Warwickshire but could not have
> been known by, say, a well-traveled nobleman from Essex (a hundred
> miles away and on the same latitude)? Or subscribed to the notion that
> only a rustic (with a manure heap in his front yard?) could have
> appreciated the charms of rural England? Not likely.
>
> In 1941, shortly after he had come to this country, Nabokov wrote a
> review for The New Republic of Frayne Williams' book, Mr. Shakespeare
> of the Globe, in which he had some very pointed things to say about
> the Stratfordian habit of biography. He began as follows: "The
> biographical part of this book will not disappoint the imaginary
> not-too-bright giant for whom blurbs are fattened and human interest
> lavishly spread." He ended with this: "Finally, it is interesting to
> learn that 'it takes two to make a conversation and the same number to
> make love' -- which fact, together with the second-best bed ('the most
> intimate monument of her life') is about all we and the voluble author
> really know concerning that particular marriage."
>
> But if Nabokov had real doubts about the authorship, why didn't he
> ever come right out and say so? Perhaps that was a fight that he did
> not need. The Nabokovs were very poor in the Forbes and even up to the
> time of the success of Lolita in the late 1950's, their finances were
> never off shaky ground. He was dependent, quite simply, on his
> sometimes precarious position in academia. Always suspect by the
> orthodox because of his staunch opposition to communism, he waded into
> further difficulty with his sometimes scathing appraisals of certain
> "established" authors and with his attacks on what he called "solidly
> unionized professional paraphrasts" and their "arty" mistranslations
> of works such as Onegin. Given what is known about the treatment of
> other, declared anti-Stratfordians at the hands of the orthodox, it
> would not be the least surprising if Nabokov had simply decided to
> keep his opinions to himself. Except, of course, for the few glimpses
> he did give us.
>
> Anything else? Well, yes, as a matter of fact. In 1924 Nabokov wrote a
> little poem in Russian which his son, Dmitri, translated into English
> in 1988. Reprinted here with his kind permission, it is called:
>
> Shakespeare
>
> Amid grandees of times Elizabethan
> you shimmered too, you followed sumptuous custom;
> the circle of ruff, the silv'ry satin that
> encased your thigh, the wedgelike beard--in all of this
> you were like other men... Thus was enfolded
> your godlike thunder in a succinct cape.
>
> Haughty, aloof from theatre's alarums,
> you easily, regretlessly relinquished
> the laurels twinning into a dry wreath,
> concealing for all time your monstrous genius
> beneath a mask; and yet, your phantasm's echoes
> still vibrate for us; your Venetian Moor,
> his anguish; Falstaff's visage, like an udder
> with pasted-on mustache; the raging Lear...
> 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 lives in pubs, and died before he could
> digest in full his portion of a boar's head)...
>
> The frigate breathed, your country you were leaving,
> To Italy you went. A female voice
> called singsong through the iron's pattern
> called to her balcony the tall inglesse,
> grown languid from the lemon-tinted moon
> and Verona's streets. My inclination
> is to imagine, possibly, the droll
> and kind creator of Don Quixote
> exchanging with you a few casual words
> while waiting for fresh horses--and the evening
> was surely blue. The well behind the tavern
> contained a pail's pure tinkling sound... Reply
> whom did you love? Reveal yourself--whose memoirs
> refer to you in passing? Look what numbers
> of lowly, worthless souls have left their trace,
> what countless names Brantome has for the asking!
> Reveal yourself, god of iambic thunder,
> you hundred-mouthed, unthinkably great bard!
>
> No! At the destined hour, when you felt banished
> by God from your existence, you recalled
> those secret manuscripts, fully aware
> that your supremacy would rest unblemished
> by public rumor's unashamed brand,
> that ever, midst the shifting dust of ages,
> faceless you'd stay, like immortality
> itself--then vanished in the distance, smiling.
>
>
> How did Vladimir Nabokov feel about the authorship? You be the judge.
>
>
> Copyright 1979 Vladimir Nabokov Estate
> English version copyright 1988 Dmitri Nabokov
>
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/
Anyone cranky-daft, Looney [sic] enough to dogmatically pick de Vere from
the long list of Bardic candidates without a deep and careful study of
Elizabethan English and Drama, and the very meaning of authorship (including
deVere¹s own published verse!) is also likely to ridicule Einstein¹s Theory
of Relativity with absolutely no knowledge of the mathematical physics
involved.
Coda: Einstein did indeed make many famous errors. When corrected by his
peers, he acknowledged his mistakes, but added the claim:
I¹ve earned the right to be wrong!
(See e.g., Jim Baggott¹s The Quantum Story: A History in 40 Moments).
VN, the great novelist/memoirist, has earned similar rights.
I swore many years ago, when living near Stratford-on-Avon and long
over-exposed to the Oxfordian-authorship pros/cons, NEVER EVER to re-enter
the fray. It¹s not strictly decidable in any mathematical-logical sense
(like squaring circles!). Any finite string of cherry-picked evidence for or
against can be refuted to the satisfaction of the dissenter.
A typical example: only an Earl could know the courtly protocols. To which
comes the rebuttal: only a glove-maker¹s son could know that trade¹s jargon,
and indeed reel off so accurately the peasants¹ vulgar sayings.
In the absence of Popperian falsibility, we leave proper¹ science, and
assess what¹s plausible. Here comes the big block to Oxfordianism: WHY?
De Vere did not hide his own authorship; he had no shame about being
associated with the theatre, being both patron and company owner.
The identity switch demands a huge conspiracy, not to mention the plays
usually dated after de Vere¹s death. To the various explanations, I invoke
Occam¹s Razor. But ... I¹m breaking my vow of silence.
Stan Kelly-Bootle
author: MUSE (Most Unusual Shakespearean Engine) or Killing Two Bards With
One Brick ... proving that Shakespeare invented the first computer on which
he composed his plays. The primitive disks were certainly made of Arden
oak:
OR CRAM WITHIN THIS WOODEN O!
(More in my Computer Contradictionary, MIT Press, 1995)
On 24/04/2012 03:59, "Vladimir Mylnikov" <vmylnikov@YAHOO.COM> wrote:
> a russian scholar gililov has some strong points regarding the bard - vn
> probably would support his theory
> vladimir m.
>
> From: piano forte <pianissimo.nyc@GMAIL.COM>
> To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
> Sent: Monday, April 23, 2012 4:48 PM
> Subject: [NABOKV-L] Seeking information on Nabokov's poem "Shakespeare"
> (1924)?
>
>
> The birthday of Nabokov and Shakespeare seems a good time to ask what VN could
> have intended by the verse below, if not to express grave doubts about the
> Bard's true identity.
>
> Does anyone on the list have any information on this early poem, which
> describes Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, with astonishing clarity?
>
> If Nabokov believed William of Stratford wrote the immortal plays and poems,
> why would Dmitri, who jealously guarded his father's reputation, permit this
> verse to be "reprinted...with his kind permission" in the Shakespeare Oxford
> Society Newsletter?
>
> Brian
>
>
> NABOKOV'S PREMONITION
>
> Ever Reader (No. 9, Summer/Fall 1999) | Ever Reader Home Page
> Vladimir Nabokov and William Shakespeare by Philip F Howerton, Jr.
>
>
------------------------------------------------------------------------------>
-
> This article was first published in the Winter 1990 Shakespeare Oxford
> Society Newsletter.
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Vladimir Nabokov, the great Russian/American writer, was born on April
> 22, 1899, in St. Petersburg, Russia. In 1914 he published his first
> work, a small book of poems in a lilac folder. It carried an epigraph
> from Romeo and Juliet. At the time of his death in 1977, he left
> behind an enormous oeuvre which included, in the opinion of many, some
> of the finest novels in Russian and English written in this century.
> Alfred Appel, a Nabokovian scholar, has said that "although the
> problem has not yet been submitted to a composer, Shakespeare would
> seem to be the writer Nabokov invokes most frequently in his novels in
> English." Nabokov himself once said that the "verbal poetical texture
> of Shakespeare is the greatest the world has known."
>
> Nabokov, whom Time magazine in 1969 called "The greatest
> living American novelist," was also a professor of literature for
> twenty years. While at Cornell he published his literal translation of
> Eugene Onegin in four volumes, together with almost nine hundred pages
> of seminal notes (over thirty references to Shakespeare) and his
> "Notes on Prosody." The latter was a book-length "outline of the
> differences and similarities" between English and Russian iambic
> tetrameters and revealed an astonishing knowledge of English as well
> as Russian poetry.
>
> In 1947 Nabokov published a bitterly satirical novel about
> totalitarianism called Bend Sinister. In Chapter Seven he took the
> opportunity (which has puzzled scholars ever since) to make the
> following, apparently ironical, comments about the Stratfordian
> attribution:
>
> "A fluted glass with a blue-veined violet and a jug of hot punch stand
> on Ember's bedtable. The buff wall directly above his bed (he has a
> bad cold) bears a sequence of three engravings.
>
> Number one represents a sixteenth-century gentleman in the act of
> handing a book to a humble fellow who holds a spear and a bay-crowned
> hat in his left hand. Note the sinistral detail (why? Ah, "that is the
> question," as Monsieur Homais once remarked, quoting le journal d'hier
> a question which is answered in a wooden voice by the Portrait on the
> title page of the First Folio). Note also the legend: "Ink, a Drug."
> Somebody's idle pencil (Ember highly treasures this scholium) has
> numbered the letters so as to spell Grudinka which means "bacon' in
> several Slavic languages.
>
> Number two shows the rustic (now clad in the clothes of the gentleman)
> removing from the head of the gentleman (now writing at a desk) a kind
> of shapska. Scribbled underneath in the same hand: "Ham-let, or
> Home-lette au Lard."
>
> Finally, number three has a road, traveler on foot (wearing the stolen
> shapska) and a road sign 'To High Wycombe."
>
> His name is protean. He begets doubles at every comer. His penmanship
> is unconsciously faked by lawyers who happen to write a similar hand.
> On the wet morning of November 27, 1582, he is Shaxpere and she is a
> Wately of Temple Grafton. A couple of days later he is Shagsper and
> she is a Hathaway of Stratford-on-Avon. Who is he? William X,
> cunningly composed of two left arms and a mask. Who else? The person
> who said (not for the first time) that the glory of God is to hide a
> thing, and the glory of man is to find it. However, the fact that the
> Warwickshire fellow wrote the plays is most satisfactorily proved on
> the strength of an applejohn and a pale primrose."
>
> Several Stratfordian academics have suggested privately, in response
> to queries, that Nabokov's assertion in Bend Sinister that "the fact
> that the Warwickshire follow wrote the plays is most satisfactorily
> proved on the strength of an applejohn and a pale primrose," may be
> taken at face value. Citing Caroline Spurgeon's Shakespeare's Imagery
> as a possible source, it is suggested that Nabokov may have felt that
> only someone familiar with the particular fauna and flora of
> Warwickshire could have written the plays. Nabokov, the argument
> presumably goes, subscribed to a theory which says, in effect, that
> because of his "genius" Shaksper was able to acquire by some sort of
> mysterious osmosis a thorough familiarity with court affairs and
> international politics, medicine and anatomy, law, music, birds,
> falconry, hunting, sailing, warfare, French, Latin, Greek, the
> environs of Italy, and more, but, by Golly, he had to be from
> Warwickshire to know that applejohns and primroses existed in England!
>
> Could such a man as Nabokov (who, by the way, was an accomplished
> naturalist) have really believed (for starters) that applejohns and
> primroses were not only endemic to Warwickshire but could not have
> been known by, say, a well-traveled nobleman from Essex (a hundred
> miles away and on the same latitude)? Or subscribed to the notion that
> only a rustic (with a manure heap in his front yard?) could have
> appreciated the charms of rural England? Not likely.
>
> In 1941, shortly after he had come to this country, Nabokov wrote a
> review for The New Republic of Frayne Williams' book, Mr. Shakespeare
> of the Globe, in which he had some very pointed things to say about
> the Stratfordian habit of biography. He began as follows: "The
> biographical part of this book will not disappoint the imaginary
> not-too-bright giant for whom blurbs are fattened and human interest
> lavishly spread." He ended with this: "Finally, it is interesting to
> learn that 'it takes two to make a conversation and the same number to
> make love' -- which fact, together with the second-best bed ('the most
> intimate monument of her life') is about all we and the voluble author
> really know concerning that particular marriage."
>
> But if Nabokov had real doubts about the authorship, why didn't he
> ever come right out and say so? Perhaps that was a fight that he did
> not need. The Nabokovs were very poor in the Forbes and even up to the
> time of the success of Lolita in the late 1950's, their finances were
> never off shaky ground. He was dependent, quite simply, on his
> sometimes precarious position in academia. Always suspect by the
> orthodox because of his staunch opposition to communism, he waded into
> further difficulty with his sometimes scathing appraisals of certain
> "established" authors and with his attacks on what he called "solidly
> unionized professional paraphrasts" and their "arty" mistranslations
> of works such as Onegin. Given what is known about the treatment of
> other, declared anti-Stratfordians at the hands of the orthodox, it
> would not be the least surprising if Nabokov had simply decided to
> keep his opinions to himself. Except, of course, for the few glimpses
> he did give us.
>
> Anything else? Well, yes, as a matter of fact. In 1924 Nabokov wrote a
> little poem in Russian which his son, Dmitri, translated into English
> in 1988. Reprinted here with his kind permission, it is called:
>
> Shakespeare
>
> Amid grandees of times Elizabethan
> you shimmered too, you followed sumptuous custom;
> the circle of ruff, the silv'ry satin that
> encased your thigh, the wedgelike beard--in all of this
> you were like other men... Thus was enfolded
> your godlike thunder in a succinct cape.
>
> Haughty, aloof from theatre's alarums,
> you easily, regretlessly relinquished
> the laurels twinning into a dry wreath,
> concealing for all time your monstrous genius
> beneath a mask; and yet, your phantasm's echoes
> still vibrate for us; your Venetian Moor,
> his anguish; Falstaff's visage, like an udder
> with pasted-on mustache; the raging Lear...
> 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 lives in pubs, and died before he could
> digest in full his portion of a boar's head)...
>
> The frigate breathed, your country you were leaving,
> To Italy you went. A female voice
> called singsong through the iron's pattern
> called to her balcony the tall inglesse,
> grown languid from the lemon-tinted moon
> and Verona's streets. My inclination
> is to imagine, possibly, the droll
> and kind creator of Don Quixote
> exchanging with you a few casual words
> while waiting for fresh horses--and the evening
> was surely blue. The well behind the tavern
> contained a pail's pure tinkling sound... Reply
> whom did you love? Reveal yourself--whose memoirs
> refer to you in passing? Look what numbers
> of lowly, worthless souls have left their trace,
> what countless names Brantome has for the asking!
> Reveal yourself, god of iambic thunder,
> you hundred-mouthed, unthinkably great bard!
>
> No! At the destined hour, when you felt banished
> by God from your existence, you recalled
> those secret manuscripts, fully aware
> that your supremacy would rest unblemished
> by public rumor's unashamed brand,
> that ever, midst the shifting dust of ages,
> faceless you'd stay, like immortality
> itself--then vanished in the distance, smiling.
>
>
> How did Vladimir Nabokov feel about the authorship? You be the judge.
>
>
> Copyright 1979 Vladimir Nabokov Estate
> English version copyright 1988 Dmitri Nabokov
>
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/