And — to glance back at Lewis Theobald for a minute — one of the bits of pedantic lumber that Shakespeare Restored offers us is this note on Hamlet’s “bare bodkin” speech, which might have attracted Vladimir Nabokov’s attention as he was imagining Pale Fire, since it supplies a missing connection (in the person of Theobald himself, Shakespeare’s pedantic, moony worshipper, and Pope’s antagonist) between Shakespeare, Pope, and the Kinbote-anagram, botkin:
I can scarce suppose that he [Shakespeare] intended to descend to a Thought, that a Man might dispatch himself with a
Bodkin
, or little Implement with which Women separate, and twist over their Hair. I rather believe, the Poet designed the Word here to signify, according to the old Usage of it, a
Dagger
.
But Pale Fire’s Charles Kinbote — the Zemblan émigré who explicates an uneven neo-Augustan poem in rhymed couplets by John Shade — isn’t only a stand-in for Pope’s minor bodkin-toting foe, Lewis Theobald: he is all of Pope’s eulogistic or crabby commentators superimposed. Here is how the Reverend Elwin describes an early editor, Warburton:
He employed his sagacity less to discover than to distort the ideas of his author, and seems to have thought that the more he deviated from the obvious sense the greater would be his fame for inventive power.… The exuberant self-sufficiency of Warburton deluded him into the belief that [Pope’s] text derived its principal lustre from the commentary. He selected for the frontispiece to his edition a monument on which were hung medallions of himself and the poet, and Blakey, the draughtsman, told Burke that ‘it was by Warburton’s particular desire that he made him the principal figure, and Pope only secondary, and that the light, contrary to the rules of art, goes upwards from Warburton to Pope.’ (xx-xxi)
The lighting is very Pale Fiery indeed. But then another Pope editor, Mark Pattison, says this of Reverend Elwin:
Mr. Elwin has adopted an opinion that Pope was engaged in a conspiracy with Bolingbroke for the writing down of the Christian religion, and the substitution of Bolingbroke’s irreligious meta-physics in its place.… To what Mr. Elwin has said of Warburton’s commentary, we can make no objection. But he has sadly laid himself open to a
tu quoque
retort, by reproducing against Pope the same strained interpretation, the same imputation of meaning never meant, and the same inconclusive prosing on moral problems, which he objects to in Warburton.
Elwin reminds Pattison, in fact, of Richard Bentley’s editing of Paradise Lost:
Bentley first created a fictitious editor, who had corrected the poem for the blind author. Having set up this imaginary personage, he could attribute to his forgery every word or line which he wished to correct. Mr. Elwin sets up the hypothesis of an antichristian conspiracy, and deduces from it the meaning of particular passages.
17
This is not so very far from Kinbote’s paranoid pother over John Shade’s wife’s suppression of the Zemblan dimension of Shade’s poem in its final version:
[W]e may conclude that the final text of
Pale Fire
has been deliberately and drastically drained of every trace of the material I contributed; but we also find that despite the control exercised upon my poet by a domestic censor and God knows whom else, he has given the royal fugitive a refuge in the vaults of the variants he has preserved.… (
Pale Fire
, Vintage ed., p. 81)
And A. E. Housman — whose poems are referred to by Charles Kinbote as the “highest achievement in English poetry in the past hundred years”—is a fussing presence behind Nabokov’s novel, too. There is one passage in particular from Housman’s Selected Prose that could have opened an injector valve in Nabokov’s Russian-gauge locomotive, if he saw it. It is from a snide review of a book of Lucilian fragments edited by Friedrich Marx:
Mr Marx should write a novel. Nay, he may almost be said to have written one; for his notes on book iii (Lucilius’ journey to Sicily) are not so much a commentary on the surviving fragments as an original narrative of travel and adventure.
18
The twenty-year-old Nabokov, in the words of his biographer Brian Boyd, encountered, while at Cambridge, Housman’s “glum features and drooping-thatch mustache … at Trinity’s high table almost every night”;19 and Boyd quotes helpfully from Speak, Memory, where Nabokov admits