Mike M writes:

In 2004 Penny McCarthy published an essay which emphasized the degree to which Ada genuflected toward Philip Sidney's romance. Entitled 'Nabokov's Ada and Sidney's Arcadia: The Regeneration of a Phoenix', it went too far into the realm of speculation, but highlighted along the way a substantial number of correspondences. Last year I pointed out a few that she missed. The annotations to Chapter 34 of Part One are now "live", as Jansy notified us, so now may be a bad time to identify a few additional links to the Sidney-Pembroke circle that show up in the first paragraph alone. And Edward de Vere (Percy de Prey, Curdy Buff, etc) of course.

The frolic under the sealyham cedar, which was described a couple of pages earlier as a "pretty Arcadian combination" of three, alludes to a pair of poems written by Philip Sidney and published (prudently) 16 years after his death, "Upon his meeting with his two worthy friends, and fellow-poets, Sir Edward Dier, and Master Fulke Greville". Their tripartite friendship was "intimate" (p. 44, "The Friend", by Alan Bray, about historical homosexual relationships). Their meeting also took place in a "shady wood".

I should point out that Lucette and Blanche are feminized versions of two "candidates" in the Shakespeare authorship question which so captivated Nabokov, de Vere and Bacon, both of whom were of questionable sexuality. Vere was associated with light, specifically candlelight, hence Lucette; Bacon hailed from St. Albans, albus being white in Latin, hence Blanche. You can read about the Vere-light link here http://lookingforshakespeare.blogspot.com/2013/04/veres-enlightenment.html.

The number of words associated with light in this single paragraph is rather copious: Golden, globes, lamps, glowed, lantern.

Any reference to green[ery] or emerald leads to Vere, who is vert in French.

A cunning Vere allusion by VN is the "kerosene reek", which is an updated version of the "I hate the nosing of candlesticks" by Vere's enemy, Gabriel Harvey, which, in the unlikely event you went to the link above, you will fully understand.

"until the nocturna" -- alludes to the famous first mention of HAMLET (in 1589, by Thomas Nashe) which was a play "read by candlelight". Before it was understood that "candlelight" meant Vere, the explanation for that phrase was that is was a critique by Nashe of a mistranslation by Thomas Kyd, the chosen playwright of the "original" Hamlet in place of Shaxper, who would have been "too young". The Latin that was an alleged mistranslation was "ad lumina", which Kyd loosely translated as "by candlelight", which actually is perfectly reasonable in a poetic context. Presumably VN knew that "until the nocturna" didn't mean "until the midnight breeze". This is his way of drawing attention to the silly rationalization that has held sway for decades. A fuller treatment is here http://lookingforshakespeare.blogspot.com/2013/04/hamlets-and-man-who-mistook-de-vere-for.html .

You won't have missed the triple m-b-l : tumbling, stumbled, humbler. This is a recurrent effect in Nabokov, and not just because the sound appealed to him. There was a contemporary prose version of Shake-speare's 'Hamlet' where the prince was called Hamblet, the m-b-l resulting from what David Bevington has called a "pronunciation tic". If you see m-b-l in Nabokov, keep your eyes open for a Shakespeare connection. VN wasn't the first to adopt this, Shak's contemporary Ben Jonson for example used "amble" when he wanted to attend to Hamlet; there are other examples that I can't think of just now.

"Tumbling the foliage": having sex in the shrubbery. In Thomas Nashe's "Summer's Last Will and Testament", the character of spring, Ver in Latin, so named in the masque whereas the three remaining seasons were given English names, is reprimanded, "Presumptuous Ver, uncivil-nurtur'd boy, Think'st I will be derided thus of thee ?", and a bit later, for "giving wenches green gowns", a phrase which meant in those days having sex in the shrubbery. That was Vere, tumbling the foliage, as Hamblet.

Sidney connections: 'Sore' is the river on which Leicester stands, and Sidney's maternal uncle was the Earl of Leicester, Elizabeth's longtime favorite. He's a "ribald nightwatchman". Leicester did have a reputation as a philanderer. However, Sore also seems to be the "securely bribed old glowworm" (Macbeth: "There 's not a one of them but in his house I keep a servant fee'd.") Anything "worm" usually refers to Vere, ver in French being worm. It appears that VN was switching attributes here or doubling up. Vere was of French origin, ancestors from western Normandy, so Burgundian will do.

"Propitious night ... impatient lovers": Romeo & Juliet.