In "The Magic of Artistic Discovery," Brian Boyd mentions
the night in which Hazel commits suicide ("Canto Two culminates in the
dreadful discovery that the Shades must make about their only child's suicide,
one March night in 1957, two years before the poet undertakes "Pale Fire." The
counterpoint between Hazel's last hours and her parents' uneasy vigil at home
while waiting for their unattractive daughter to return from her first blind
date creates an unbearable tension and poignancy as time swings back and forth,
ticking away to the irretrievable moment of her death at the very midpoint of
the poem...For all his sense of the mystery behind death, Shade knows he cannot
force the door to the beyond..") Later, Brian Boyd shall disclose his own
theory about the influence of Hazel's ghost in the developments of the novel,
"Pale Fire."
Having recently inquired into "the ides of March" in
Shakespeare, I read his lines about Julius Caesar, walking
stealthily towards his death, inspite of various warnings (Calpurnia's
dream and a prophet warning him about the ides of March). The seer's
warning to Cesar carried me to Shade's walk towards Judge Goldsworth's
house and the Red Vanessa, as accounted for by Kinbote. However, inspite
of the reference to a Coriolanus lane (linked to Timon, in one of the
Zemblan events) and Shakespeare's alley of trees, this passage cannot
sufficiently account for considering Shade's muder, and Hazel's death in March,
as a hint to Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar"... This play has not been considered
by Meyer, nor was it cited by Boyd but, in his index to MAD, he includes another
play (among the Roman ones), "Antony and Cleopatra" (Cf. mainly on pages
238/239), related to the moment in which Shade writes about the tormentous
March night and parodies Eliot's "image in 'The Waste Land' of a seated
beauty amid multiple reflections, and the way it responds to Shakespeare with a
kind of deliberately brittle vacuity." ( the lines, in question, are from
Antony and Cleopatra).
Anyway, two of Shakespeare's three "Roman" plays are, even if
indirectly, referenced in Pale Fire. Neverthelss, there's no hint of the
third, "Julius Caesar," a ruler exiled by death, although scholars
frequently mention the links between Nabokov's novel and his personal grief
after his father's murder in Berlin (was it in a
theatre?).