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Scene 4
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Betrayal, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Love, Jealousy and Betrayal
Time, Perspective, and Identity
Literature and Integrity
Responsibility and Consequences
Summary
Analysis
The night before their planned trip to the island of Torcello, in the summer of 1973, Emma and Robert are in a hotel room in Venice. Emma is reading a new novel by Spinks. Robert reveals that Spinks is Jerry’s client and that Jerry had tried to get him to publish it, but he declined. Robert felt the book’s theme, betrayal, is exhausted. Emma disagrees that this is the book’s theme.
The play has moved another year backward in time. The mention of Torcello alerts the reader that the Yeats incident Jerry recalls in Scene 2 is shortly to come. The recounted disagreement over Spinks’s merits again shows Robert taking a more exacting view of contemporary literature than Jerry.
Themes
Robert reveals that while cashing travelers’ checks at an American Express office yesterday, the clerks tried to give him a letter that had arrived for Emma, since he has the same last name. He declined on the principle that he and Emma could well have been unrelated, criticizing the Italians’ easygoing attitude toward mail and privacy. Nevertheless, he saw that letter was from Jerry. Robert reminisces about the long letters he and Jerry used to write to each other in their university days as poetry magazine editors. In the letters, they discussed Yeats and the other writers they were reading.
Robert’s refusal to open Emma’s mail is in effect a refusal to betray her—a fact he leverages in this monologue to highlight Emma’s guilt by contrast, which he has come to suspect. Robert’s own recollections of writing letters to Jerry border on the romantic, wistfully recalling a time when their relationship to literature was based purely on enthusiasm for literature’s artistic merits and not on commerce.
Themes
Robert insinuates that Jerry, who was the best man at his wedding, might be having an affair with Emma. Emma confirms this. Robert admits he hadn’t suspected it until he saw the letter. His reaction is subdued, but he’s alarmed when she tells him the affair’s been going on for five years, as their son is only a year old. Emma reassures him that the child is his.
Robert’s typical unemotive demeanor holds steadfast through Emma’s admission of her affair, suggesting that he’s already made peace with the fact. Yet the potential threat to his paternity strikes at the heart of his masculinity and thus manages to get a rise out of him.
Themes
Robert declares that he’s always liked Jerry, even more than he likes Emma, and perhaps should have had an affair with him himself. He then asks Emma once again if she’s excited to visit Torcello.
Robert’s droll, sarcastic remark nevertheless carries a hint of truth, considering Robert’s quasi-romantic reminiscences of his and Jerry’s letter-writing days, as well as his adamant distaste for female intrusion on male activities. The quasi-joke here is that the logical conclusion of Robert’s misogyny would be homosexuality.
Themes
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