Pale Fire: A Magazine in 12 Projects Group Three | Page 41

ple tastes of theatrical critics ful history, /Is second childish-
and cook up a stage play, an ness and mere oblivion, /Sans
old-fashioned teeth, sans eyes, sans taste,
melodrama
with three principles: a luna-
sans everything.”
tic who intends to kill an im-
aginary king, another lunatic
who imagines himself to be
that
king,
and
a
distin-
guished old poet who stum-
bles by chance into the line of
fire.” It is possible that Nabo-
kov intended his novel to be
one big play, where all of his
characters
are
just
actors
playing different parts. Just
as Shakespeare put it in his
play As You Like It, “ All the
world's a stage, /And all the
men
and
women
merely
players;/They have their exits
and their entrances, /And one
man in his time plays many
parts, /… Last scene of all, /
- ALEXIS HART
That ends this strange event-
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