Shakespeare References in Evergreen

Belva Plain’s novel Evergreen contains several Shakespeare references. The first is to Shakespeare himself. Plain writes: “She read from Henley’s Invictus (what pompous nonsense!) to Kipling and Shakespeare. There was no consolation. You had to find your own courage” (p. 117). The second reference is also to Shakespeare: “Mama is always studying something. Shakespeare or a course at the Museum of Art” (p. 130). The novel also mentions Julius Caesar: “She had found one sneaker, a high school text of Julius Caesar with Maury’s name in a flourish of bright green ink and a doodle of a fat man smoking a pipe, his teacher perhaps” (p. 329). The next reference is to Macbeth. After the character Joseph says “It’ll be a hot one tomorrow,” Belva Plain writes: “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. Separate from the other unnamed billions who walk the earth, each of these little groups of three or five or twelve, brought together by the shuffle of chance, then welded by blood, sees in itself the whole of earth, or all that matters of it” (p. 441). “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” is the first line of Macbeth’s greatest speech. The book’s final reference is to Romeo And Juliet. The character Iris says: “I want… I want… something like Romeo and Juliet. I want to be loved exclusively. Do you understand?” (p. 514).

Evergreen was published in 1978. The copy I read is the Second Dell Printing, from July 1979.