The intertextuality of the room : a reading of selected plays by Harold Pinter, Joe Orton, and David Mamet

This dissertation applies the critical technique of intertextual analysis to selected plays by the contemporary playwrights Harold Pinter, Joe Orton, and David Mamet. My basic argument is that the early plays of Harold Pinter—The Room, The Birthday Party, and The Dumb Waiter—articulate a set of signs which recur among them and in later plays by Pinter and Orton and Mamet as well. Since these later plays have often been seen as confusing and obscure, I hope to illuminate certain ways of apprehending these texts by providing readings of the early plays so that, when the signs from these early plays reappear in the later works, they are less obscure. In other words, I show that the later plays are transformations of and reflections of the earlier plays and thus a sign whose meaning is not clear in a later play may be sufficiently clarified by appealing to a reading of it from an earlier play. I begin with Pinter's The Room (1957) and end with Mamet's American Buffalo (1976).