Pale Fire: class assignment

My best guess as to the origins of the title "Pale Fire", is that it is taken from Timon of Athens Act 4, scene 3: 

The sun's a thief, and with his great attraction
Robs the vast sea: the moon's an arrant thief,
And her pale fire she snatches from the sun:
The sea's a thief, whose liquid surge resolves
The moon into salt tears: the earth's a thief,
That feeds and breeds by a composture stolen
From general excrement: each thing's a thief:

This passage appears in Pale Fire as:

The sun is a thief: she lures the sea

and robs it. The moon is a thief:

he steals his silvery light from the sun.

The sea is a thief: it dissolves the moon.   

*emphasis added

As a side note: I find it interesting that Nabokov performed a gender reversal of the sun and the moon, returning to the original order of things. 

Who killed John Shade? The name shade suggests a blocking of the sun's light which is, if I am correct about the origins of the title, antithetical to the central character or idea. The only thing I believe Shade to have been truly protective of is his daughter Hazel. Perhaps then, Shade does indeed exist, and it is Kinbote who is the imaginary figure, built to shield Hazel from the full scrutiny of the readers. This theory of course suggests that Shade did not actually die and that the entire work of Pale Fire is his literary creation. The greatest flaw with this theory is its extreme simplicity which is entirely out of character for Nabokov. 

Receiving little explicit help from the commentary as to the location of the crown jewels, my best guess (which is really a wild conjecture) is that they are hidden in the butterflies strewn throughout the poem. On page 108, the commentary to line 80, Kinbote writes:

"Otar, her lover, said that when you walked behind her, and she knew you were walking behind her, the swing and play of those slim haunches was something intensely artistic, something Arab girls were taught in special schools by special Parisian panders who were afterwards strangled. Her fragile ankles, he said, which she placed very close together in her dainty and wavy walk, were the "careful jewels" in Arnor's poem about a miragarl ("mirage girl"), for which "a dream king in the sandy wastes of time would give three hundred camels and three fountains." *emphasis added

Not only does the description of Fleur remind me of a butterfly, but the passage itself also suggests that jewels need not necessarily be stones. Given Nabokov's love of butterflies and their constant appearances strewn throughout the novel, as Kinbote claims the jewels to be, I think it is not entirely improbable to suggest the butterflies are the jewels.