ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the influence that Shakespeare had on Pinter before he started writing for the theatre. This includes his schooldays and his early professional work as an actor. This also covers the influence that the Jacobean playwright John Webster had on Pinter.
One of the first surviving pieces of Pinter’s writing is an essay called ‘A Note on Shakespeare’, written in 1950, that discusses what audiences ‘get wrong’ about Shakespeare and in doing so sets out an artistic vision of approaching and understanding drama that can be seen in his own later writing for the theatre. This was followed by a short and precociously early autobiographical account of Pinter growing up which makes some direct references to Shakespeare’s work and establishes it as a facet of his early self-fashioning. Pinter’s only novel, The Dwarfs, has a chapter where the discussion put forward in ‘A Note on Shakespeare’ is revised for a conversation between two characters (one of whom is closely based on Pinter).
These early works all demonstrate the early role that Shakespeare had in shaping Pinter’s view of the theatre and his self-fashioning.
