SOURCE: O'Toole, Fintan. “Our Own Jacobean.” New York Review of Books 46, no. 15 (7 October 1999): 28-32.

In the following review, O'Toole discusses the development of Pinter's political commitments as expressed in his plays.

1.

In early-seventeenth-century England, in the midst of what was supposed to be a golden age, young playwrights sounded a note of harsh discord. Against the myth of Elizabethan glory, they placed increasingly violent images of torture, of the abuse of power, and of profound psychological and political disturbance. Cyril Tourneur, John Webster, and others combined melodramatic action with brilliantly concentrated language, familiar issues with exotic settings, lurid plots with a fierce intensity of emotion and characterization. For a long time, critics could not decide whether their work was, on the one hand, utterly decadent or, on the other, profoundly moral.

The uncertainty was largely a matter of tone. In plays like Tourneur's The Revenger's Tragedy or Webster's...