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yer by art and by early training, being virtually raised by Yorick, the court jester. Harold Bloom makes this point: “[Hamlet] is a changeling, nurtured by Yorick, yet fathered by himself, an actor-playwright from the start, though it would not be helpful to identify him with his author.” 50 The character of Quilty is also a changeling, partly modeled on Hamlet. But here it is reasonable to identify Quilty with his author (both Nabokov and Kubrick), for two reasons. First, Quilty (unlike Hamlet) plays with the other characters solely for his own aesthetic bliss, just as Nabokov claims to do in the famous afterword to Lolita. 51 Second, as Appel points out, there is a regular use of involution throughout Lolita, whereby the artist involves himself in the work and thus plays with the boundary separating the inside and outside of the work. 52 In Lolita, this occurs through identification with the character of Quilty and Quilty’s constant escort, Vivian Darkbloom (Marianne Stone). Notice that her name is actually an anagram for Vladimir Nabokov. And Vivian Darkbloom, Nabokov tells us in the foreword, is in fact writing a novel entitled My Cue (Quilty’s nickname is “Cue”). So, it appears that Vivian Darkbloom is a double for Quilty and Nabokov—her gender being the difference. Yet even this is played with in a conversa kddy e1l44