A friend of mine is moving, and I’m helping her go through some things; from her old Shakespeare class notes, I picked up a couple of articles printed from JSTOR’s archive of Shakespeare Quarterly.

One of the articles is Eric Rasmussen’s “Fathers and Sons in Hamlet“. The content is interesting; the length is what caught me off guard. It’s four short paragraphs, two footnotes, less than 350 words. I didn’t know one could publish such short articles. It could have been a blog post!

I could have written such a blog post, was my next thought. Had I Rasmussen’s acuity, anyway, to see “five pairs of murdered fathers and revenger sons” and that Hamlet “achieves a perfect balance: a subplot in which a son revenges his murdered father (Laertes-Polonius) is counterpoised against a subplot in which a son does not (Fortinbras); meanwhile, a classical allusion to revenge (Pyrrhus) is set against a classical allusion to the lack of revenge (Brutus).” (p. 463, SQ, Winter 1984) I registered Polonius’ comment that he “did enact Julius Caesar”, but I didn’t connect it to Brutus. The revenge/lack of revenge subplots flew right by me.

This, also, is why I am not a famous Shakespearean scholar, and Rasmussen is. Notably, he is editing a semicolon-less new Complete Works for the RSC, about which I am very excited, and according to that last PDF link, he is General Textual Editor for the Internet Shakespeare Editions Project, which I didn’t know existed but is getting a sidebar link so I can visit often.

The fascinating things one learns by following breadcrumbs!