Shaping Reinterpreting Shakespeare's Tragedies in the Light of Harold Pinter

AbstractTwo centuries ago Voltaire remarked, “All the arts are brothers, eachone is a light to the other” (p. 199 Shakespeare on Film, 2000). This maxim is astriking illustration when we study the plays of Harold Pinter along with theplays of William Shakespeare. Martin Esslin called Shakespeare, Goethe, andlbsen as harbingers of violence and absurdity. After the Second World War, theAbsurd playwrights have casted their net too wide which had its seed in theplays of the Elizabethan Age. In the long history of dramatic writing we haveexperienced a new way of life, a new way of feeling and a new state of mind.William Shakespeare, the dramatist of ‘all ages and all times’, andHarold Pinter, the man of highest theatrical qualities since Shaw, have differentgrounds to bring them together in this paper. They have used commonplacedetail to bring out the complexity and pathos of ordinary lives with ‘unbearablesadness of time’s effects upon them’. They were the dramatists by whom theviolence and absurdity of the ancient and the modern world were presented onthe stage.Keywords: Violence, absurdity, complexity, pathos, harbinger, dramatist,tragedyVol. 1, Special Issue: 1, March 2025This