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Re: Danish stilettto
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Penny wrote:
I really meant that Nabokov is making an allusion (just as Thomas Nashe used
to do to great effect: (‘hast never heard of Will Monox. and his great
dagger?’)) by conflating ideas from a Shakespeare play, to give us a clue. But
even your ‘surely’, to point to what you think is obvious, is doubtful: Andrew
Hadfield has suggested that ‘take arms against a sea of troubles/ And by
opposing, end them’ might well argue that Hamlet is here considering killing
Claudius (?with a dagger?) which would pretty quickly entail his own death. It’s
a very plausible reading, in the context – ‘whether . . in the mind to
suffer/ Or . . .’. ‘Bare’ might mean ‘mere’; or it might not.
This comment rather puzzles me. Andrew Hadfield is a new name to me: he is
well after my time, and I haven’t read him, though I see he is a literary
critic of great eminence and authority. However, it has been reasonably obvious
to me for the last 45 years, since university days, that Hamlet’s soliloquy
is an expression of his inner thoughts on at least three or four or even more
matters of concern to him. As I mentioned to Penny on 2/12/06, I mentioned
this in my post of 12/11/2006:
The most famous soliloquy in Northern literature is usually interpreted as
solely a meditation on suicide. However, also present in Hamlet's troubled
mind are thoughts of revenge by murder, as well as his sense of sexual
frustration and/or disgust.
Perhaps I wasn’t making myself plain enough. Hamlet’s sea of troubles
include:
The possibility that his father has been murdered by his uncle Claudius
The usurpation of the throne (perhaps his by right) by Claudius
His replacement, as he sees it, in his mother’s affections by that same
Claudius
His desire for revenge, and how it is to be accomplished
His sense of frustration in his dealings with Ophelia: has she rejected his
advances?
The fact that members of the Court are spying on him, testing him, humouring
him
His sense of political impotence
His inability to resolve these matters by taking action
Killing Claudius would not “entail his own death”, quickly or otherwise.
Hamlet’s concern is with his own conscience, and possible eventual retribution
in an afterlife, not in the Danish Court. The moral legitimacy of revenge
was a major theme in tragedy of Shakespeare’s era. His problems with Ophelia
are never specified, but they might be resolved by taking her either by force,
or by seduction: or else he feels a post-coital melancholy --- we are not
told. They may be purely a sense of disgust with women in general, as
exemplified for him by his mother’s conduct. His resolution of his feelings for his
mother are too taboo to be contemplated, but I go along with the Freud, Ernest
Jones, Olivier reading. Finally, he could terminate the whole turmoil by
terminating himself, but that is also forbidden since the canon against
self-slaughter had been equally fixed.
The “consummation”, the “quietus”, the “bodkin”: all three words carry
multiple senses for all these problems. Sex and violence. The words are
deliberately chosen for the ambiguities of their interpretation: the audience can
make of them what best suits them, but it is precisely this richness of
possible interpretation which has fascinated audiences for 400 years. “Bare” merely
amplifies the ambiguity. "To be or not to be", in English, carries two
senses.
It is difficult to know precisely what “clue” Nabokov is giving us by “
conflating ideas”, which seem to me to be limited to the mention of “bodkin” or “
botkin”. I do feel that too much is being made of the belief that there is
some pat final inner solution to the whole content of Pale Fire; and that an
ultimate explanation of the book, in those terms, is about as likely as a
conclusive reading of a painting by Magritte or de Chirico, Chagall or Braque, or
even Dali.
Charles
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