Echoes was first published in 1985.
This blog started out as Michael Doherty's Personal Library, containing reviews of books that normally don't get reviewed: basically adult and cult books. It was all just a bit of fun, you understand. But when I embarked on a three-year Shakespeare study, Shakespeare basically took over, which is a good thing.
Saturday, April 15, 2023
Shakespeare References in Echoes
Maeve Binchy’s novel Echoes
contains a few references to Shakespeare’s Romeo
And Juliet. All three times, the character Gerry Doyle is referred to as
Romeo. Binchy writes, “‘I can’t believe he’s still the Romeo,’ David complained” (p. 182). And then: “People
sang the words softly to each other, oddly assorted people like David Power who
sang them into Josie’s ear because he hadn’t got to Clare O’Brien before Romeo”
(p. 200). And finally: “Well hadn’t Clare got David Power as her husband, and
the town Romeo Gerry Doyle was saying only the other night in the hotel that he
wished he had moved in before the young doctor” (p. 436). In addition to those
references, Binchy’s line “Instead, her mind was full of snakes and worries slithering
around” (p. 84) reminds me a bit of the line from Macbeth, “O, full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife.” And Blinchy’s
line “No, there would be neither rhyme nor reason going somewhere like Rome and
drinking milk” (p. 139) makes us think of the lines from The Comedy Of Errors, “Was there ever any man thus beaten out of
season,/When in the why and the wherefore is neither rhyme nor reason?”
Apparently, the phrase did not originate with Shakespeare, though he
popularized it, using it again in As You
Like It: “Neither rhyme nor reason can express how much.”
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