Shakespeare

Last night when I was going to sleep, I was thinking about the four sisters I took care of when I was living in Los Angeles two years ago. Sophia, Lilliya, Violet, and Lola (the latter two being twins.)

I was closest with Lilliya (who was seven at the time) and she painted me this painting:


One day I helped Lilliya memorize some Shakespeare for a day-program she was in that summer. Her piece was that of the Fairy from A Midsummer Night's Dream. I actually have the recording of her final performance somewhere at home. I should dig it out; it's absolutely Beautiful!

So anyhow I was thinking about her last night and I started saying her little monologue in my head. I realized that Nabokov stole from this too for his "pale fire."

It goes:

Over hill, over dale,
Through bush, through briar,
Over park, over pale,
Through flood, through fire,
I do wander everywhere,
Swifter than the moon's sphere;
And I serve the fairy queen,
To dew her orbs upon the green.
The cowslips tall her pensioners be:
In their gold coats spots you see;
Those be rubies, fairy favours,
In those freckles live their savours:
I must go seek some dewdrops here
And hang a pearl in every cowslip's ear.
Farewell, thou lob of spirits; I'll be gone:
Our queen and all our elves come here anon. (2.1.2-17)
--------
To me, this is about the little fairy who flies everywhere and even between the two worlds of shade and sun. She flies "swifter than the moon's sphere." She paints the dewdrops in the cowslips and the spots in the gold coats of the flower. She leaves these "fairy favours" from the world of the shade for the world of the sun to discover the next morning. She is the relayer of messages between the worlds.




The other day when Dr. Minton introduced Shakespeare into our pale fire world, I realized how incredibly vast Nabokov is just in general. He expertly jumps around from Joyce to Shakespeare, from Poe to Pope. Dr. Minton noted Kinbote's commentary to lines 671-672 on page 240. Kinbote writes, "Such titles possess a specious glamor acceptable maybe in the names of vintage wines and plump courtesans but only degrading in regard to the talent that substitutes the easy allusiveness of literacy for original fancy and shifts onto a bust's shoulders the responsibility for ornateness since anybody can flip through a Midsummer Night's Dream or Romeo and Juliet, or, perhaps, the Sonnets and take his pick."

Now after rehearsing A Midsummer Night's Dream last night in my mind, I realize that Nabokov's casual brush off of these two works was on purpose. I believe that the fairy's monologue above is the passage he wants you to find in A Midsummer Night's Dream, and that the following passage below is that which he desires you to find in Romeo and Juliet.

"But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks?
It is the east, and Juliet is the sun!--
Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon,
Who is already sick and pale with grief,
That thou her maid art far more fair than she." (2.2.2-6)

In this passage, the moon is the pale fire of Juliet, the sun. interesting?
I'm not sure how exactly this all ties in with Hazel, the shades, pale fires, pale light flitting around the walls in the barn, the message, the communication between the world of the living and the dead, the world of the shades and the world of the sun. Sun is growth and vibrance. Shade is the absence of sun. And the moon is the pale reflection of the fire of the sun (sometimes put into shade by the meddling shadow of the earth.)

Also, Kinbote mentions in the same note on 240, "perhaps, the Sonnets." I googled and found a sonnet from As You Like It. I am not familiar with this particular work of Shakespeare's, but I have before heard the sonnet. Here it is:

"Hang there, my verse, in witness of my love;
And thou, thrice-crowned queen of night, survey
With thy chaste eye, from thy pale sphere above,
Thy huntress' name that my full life doth sway.
O Rosalind! these trees shall be my books,
And in their barks my thoughts I'll character;
That every eye which in this forest looks
Shall see thy virtue witness'd every where.
Run, run, Orlando: carve on every tree
The fair, the chaste, and unexpressive she." (3.2.1-10)

Again the pale sphere of the moon.

Is pale fire just love? Or is it a love that can never be fully realized? Is it a pale fire of the love between two that was possible?
Like I said I'm not as familiar with As You Like It, but Romeo and Juliet's love was only pale and never full or entirely fulfilled except in their deaths. Is John Shade's love also a pale fire as he never got to love his daughter through the fullness of her childhood? Is it the love that hangs between worlds, the residue of love that hangs behind? Maybe I've taken this too far.