Chapter One Introduction
1.1 Introduction to Harold Pinter
Harold Pinter, bom in London in 1930，has been regarded as one of the greatestplaywrights since Bernard Shaw in the history of English drama. For his great achievementand contribution to literature and society, Pinter earned his fame as a Nobel Prize winner in2005 not only for his 29 plays and some other screenplays or poems, but because of hisindefatigable efforts made to protect human rights and resist the war.
Pinter was bom in a Jewish family in Hackney, in London's East End, where got horribleand worst attacks during the world war. Therefore, little Pinter experienced a life of bombing,shooting，escaping and evacuation for more than ten years, even at no times，he and hisfamily lived in bomb shelter, But his farther, Jack Pinter, was a industrious tailor，who made adecent living for Pinter. His mother, Frances, went through a turbulent time when Pinter wasyoung，but she had never stopped teaching her son read. All that experience in childhood leftPinter an expression of fear and threat, which, to great extent, took enormous psychologicalshadow on Pinter's life and his works. Because of the special experience in his life, Pinterbecame a rebellious man. He refused to serve in the army and was thrown in prison twice.Therefore, challenging authority is one of his characteristics.
After graduating from school, Pinter adopted Davis Barron as his stage name in 1954，and became an actor in different theaters. Meanwhile, he also kept learning drama writing. In1957，for the sake of helping his friend, Pinter created his first play The Room. As the resultof the successful performance of this play in Bristol University, Pinter started his dramaticwriting career from then on. After that, a series of plays created by Pinter have been shown onthe stage, The Caretaker and The Homecoming brought him both with wealth and fame.Having obtained a mixed appraise, Pinter has never stopped writing. Besides，he was a screenwriter and a director as well; he adopted more than 20 works of others, including The ProstScreenplay (1972), and The French Lieutenant's Women. In all his life, not only did he devotehimself to the creation of dramas, poems, novels and screen plays，but also committedhimself to the struggle for human rights and a peaceful world. Especially，in his late years, he stopped writing. Criticizing hegemonism and opposing war has become one of his mostimportant missions. He never stopped struggling for social righteousness until his death in2008 for esophagus cancer.
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1.2 Introduction to Harold Pinter's Works
As a prolific writer, Pinter wrote more than 30 plays, 100 poems and 2 novels, ofwhich plays established him an unshakable position in literature history. On the one hand，hesucceeded to the style of Samuel Beckett，the representatives of Theatre of the Absurd andwas influenced by other writers like James Joyce, Franz Kafka, and German philosopherMartin Heidegger; On the other hand, Pinter himself was a dramatic innovator. He created anatmosphere of mystery, evasion, obscure, menace, which helped him get the unique tag of“Pinteresque，，and “Comedy of menace". In 1958，Irving Wardle applied “Comedy ofMenace" to The Birthday Party, which was firstly coined by David Campton in 1975 for thesubtitle of Pinter's one-act Plays collectively called The Lunatic View, though hesubsequently intended to break away from this label. ( Bernard F. Dukore, 1982: 23 ) Apart fromthe two tags, realism and theater of absurd also had been used as the main characteristics andstyles in Harold Pinter's works.
Pinter's plays are generally classified into four types according to the time: Comedy ofMenace, which put its plot in a closed environment such as a room, a house, a basement. Thecharacters in such plays suffer menace of some kind or are hurt by the unknown forces. Allthese threat or hurt comes from inside or outside，which is fUll of mystery. These plays havesomething in common
