On Apr 23, 2012, at 2:48 PM, piano forte wrote: The birthday of Nabokov and Shakespeare seems a good time to ask what VN could have intended by the verse below, if not to express grave doubts about the Bard's true identity. Does anyone on the list have any information on this early poem, which describes Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, with astonishing clarity? If Nabokov believed William of Stratford wrote the immortal plays and poems, why would Dmitri, who jealously guarded his father's reputation, permit this verse to be "reprinted...with his kind permission" in the Shakespeare Oxford Society Newsletter?

Brian

Na und? Forgive my flippancy, but really, so what if VN preferred the authorship of de Vere of Oxford over that of William of Stratford? He was after all a notorious snob, inordinately proud of his aristocratic blood - not a side of him that I find particularly attractive. Fortunately for our favorite сноб, he did not live to discover that his vaunted descent from Genghis Khan is now genetically determined to make him one among approximately 16 million other males ... and by now, probably God knows how many more (the study was published in 2003).

The opening of the poem in Dmitri's translation however is particularly fine, and reinforces my belief that VN was a superb poet and has yet to be properly recognized as such. So, perhaps a day late - or nine early - I salute his memory with my own brand of jaundice-tinged hosannahs.

* As a retired piano tuner-technician, who specialized in the restoration of antique keyboards of which the "forte piano" was a favorite, I come by the rubric honestly.