How to fix "The code of method .. is exceeding the 65535 bytes limit"?

I have the following code:

public static void main(String[] args) {
    try {
        String[] studentnames = {
            /* this is an array of 9000 strings... */
        };
    }
}

I get the following error when trying to compile this:

The code of method main(String[]) is exceeding the 65535 bytes limit