Mike Marcus to Jansy:["Nabokov may have tried to mislead the reader into thinking about Roman mythology, instead of perceiving that the "Roman deity" is the Virgin Mary.In this way, should Bill Fraser and Percy de Prey be related to the Shakespeare controversies, Bill (Shakespeare?) would be seen as a Catholic and not a Protestant, by our author"] " 1. Bill Fraser was the actor who played a soldier in a 1960s tv show in the UK called 'The Army Game', so he'd fit in a similar role in Ada. But he transforms into Broken-Arm Bill, who as you intuited, means Shakespeare...(from http://www.sirbacon.org/overlap.htm). The "Roman deity" is the Catholic version of God. Shakespeare's religion is indeed a vexed subject. I personally enjoyed the 1848 book by W. J. Birch that has WS as an atheist". .
2."Certain identities fluctuate wildly in Ada, so Percy de Prey doesn't at all times represent Vere, though here he does, predominantly. The "daughter with pitcher" reminds me of the passage in Genesis 24, when Rebekah, with a pitcher on her shoulder, offers water to the parched Isaac, who is her second cousin and whom she marries (relatives marrying; Cordula is also Van's second cousin). Tartar as Turk? "Pitcher peri" must be the angel with the pitcher, whoever she is, no? Vere and Sidney were enemies, and Ardis is the Sidney arrowhead -- a "stab of Ardis"?"
3."In her January 2004 essay published in the MLR ('Nabokov's Ada and Sidney's Arcadia, The Regeneration of a Phoenix'), Penny McCarthy claimed that there were three reasons "why Nabokov might have seen himself as Sidney's double"... I can't see it. If he imagined himself as anyone's double, it would have been Hamlet".

Jansy Mello: I thought about the Virgin Mary, instead of a Roman Catholic God, because I understood that "Our Lady" was not similarly revered by Catholics and Protestants, serving to indicate affiliation to one or the other faiths. However, I didn't realize that the Anglican Church preserves the cult to the Virgin Mary much like the Roman Catholic believers.

It is fascinating how, when expressed, one perceives totally different perspectives in one's reading of a Nabokov work. Mike Marcus interpreted "a stab of Ardis" as an attack against Sidney's Arcady whereas, for me, "a stab of Ardis" means the pain resulting from a painful recollection of things past., not the prodding of an arrow directed towards something in the outside world. The "stab," in my perspective, leads to a mnemonic retake of an experience that mirrors present events (this is why I mentioned the paragraph's "holographic" quality (I'd just finished watching Arnold Schwartznegger on TV in the old "Total Recall".)

While checking on "dangereux voisinage" I found another interesting reference to Shakespeare (cor-dula and cor-delia). Demon and Daniel Veen both have incestuous and pedophilic leanings. Actually, so does Van. Perhaps not only Hamlet, but also King Lear had a special significance to Nabokov? Would this lie behind his strong refusal of Oedipal theories?