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Mike M writes:
In my first posting here (6/30) I mentioned that it was possible that
Ben Wright might have alluded to Shakespeare's contemporary Ben [Jonson
play]Wright. I'd not seen the Darkbloom glossary at that time (I didn't
know there was one), where VD explains that BW was a poet in his own
right, which confirms my original suspicion.
Ben Wright's co-driver was Trofim Fartukov. Anyone who knows anything
about Vere Earl of Oxford knows a) that he quarreled with Philip Sidney
and b) that he left Queen Elizabeth's court in disgrace because of a
fart, and only retuned after seven years (I think John Aubrey is the
accepted source of this tale, which certainly got the timeline wrong)
by which time the Queen told him that she'd "forgot the fart". Anyway,
as I think I've demonstrated pretty comprehensively over the past
month, Nabokov knew the Oxfordian case in great depth, and would
certainly have known about the notorious fart. Strangely enough it does
seem to have survived in a Shakespeare play, Romeo and Juliet, where
there is talk (with Mercutio) of straining courtesy, as they call it
(Oxfordians think Vere was Romeo, so to speak). Another play by one of
Shakespeare's contemporaries, which lampoons Vere in its leading
character, has one of the ladies say that this person was "a little to
blame", i.e. he'd p!
assed gas in secret. So there must have been some truth to the story
after all.
If Fartukov represents Vere, the "ukov" suffix is
redundant. Perhaps the same applies to Trofim, so dripping the "im"
leaves "Trof", or trough. Considering that Vere's family emblem was the
boar
http://shake-speares-bible.com/dissertation/Chapter6/index4.html,
and that he was Shalksbore in Pale Fire, the associated word 'trough'
might not be outlandish.
I
think it not irrelevant that on the second page of Ada, Dan Veen's
mother was a Trumbell; Vere's grandmother was a Trussell. "Bull", we
are told, became "bell". Trussell was an old word for trestle. In both
cases, an "e" replaced a "u". Note also the "sidetracked by a
bore-baiter": Shalksbore baiter?
There is also a pertinent albeit short paragraph on p. 56:
"So let us not bore the boor who flips through a book and
thinks: "what a hoaxer, that old V. V."
Both
types of bore/boor, but no boar. I already drew attention to the VV
(slightly separated Vs) printing of "William" in a Shakespeare quarto.
As for hoaxer, I quote from a letter by Henry James:
"I
am 'sort of' haunted by the conviction that the divine William is the
biggest and most successful fraud ever practiced on a patient world".
MM