Chapter 4

Please keep these annotations SPOILER-FREE by not revealing information from later pages in the novel.

94/97 - The Search for Bridey Murphy
This book by Morey Bernstein, published in 1956, was about Virginia Tighe who, under hypnosis, began speaking in an Irish brogue and claimed that she was Bridey Murphy from Cork, Ireland. Past-lives regressions became big news. Read more...; Wikipedia

110/114 - Such was the (as it were) Jacobean etiology of Esther's eventual trip to Cuba; which see.
Pynchon must mean "Jacobean" in the sense of the Jacobean revenge-plays, written during the reign of James I (1603 – 1625) in England, the hallmarks of such plays being lust, revenge and murder. Where the plays of the Elizabethan era (1558-1603) were characterized by a sense of providential justice, a sense that the ravages of evil will ultimately be overcome by an inevitable movement of the cosmos toward moral harmony, Jacobean tragedies tended to depict corruption and violence that did not suggest divine retribution, the ultimate triumph of good and restoration of moral order.

Interesting that Pynchon uses "etiology" which usually means the cause of a disease, to characterize Esther's motivation for the trip to Cuba.

In Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 contains an extended parody of the Jacobean revenge-play formula, titled The Courier's Tragedy and written by the fictitious Richard Wharfinger.