Mike Marcus asked for the evidence that it was plausible that Nabokov might have created a "fictitious lyrical I" in his poem "Shakespeare". Other poets have done this and have commented that their poems shouldn't be taken as autobiographical facts or sincere statements of belief. As for Nabokov, Stephen Blackwell alluded to his statement in Strong Opinions that "People tend to underestimate the power of my imagination and my capacity of evolving serial selves in my writings." Nabokov in his teens wrote poems about "the loss of a beloved mistress--Delia, Tamara, or Lenore--whom I had never lost, never loved, never met, but was all set to meet, love, lose." In the years after the Revolution he wrote many poems that mentioned God, but later called it a period of "a kind of private curatorship, aimed at preserving nostalgic retrospections and developing Byzantine imagery (this has been mistaken by some readers for an interest in 'religion' which, beyond literary stylization, never meant anything to me)". So "Shakespeare" is not necessarily a sincere statement of anti-Stratfordianism any more than "in a drop of honey, in a translucent-green dewdrop/ I recognize God and the world and myself" is a sincere statement of religious faith.
Jerry Friedman
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