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Themes
Themes and Colors
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Betrayal, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
The title of Pinter’s play leaves no room for uncertainty about its thematic focus. Moving in reverse-chronological order, the play traces the years-long affair between a married literary agent named Jerry and Emma, his best friend Robert’s wife. Their affair is a betrayal, simple enough: Jerry betrays his wife, and they both betray Robert—Emma as his wife and Jerry as his oldest friend. But the straightforward betrayal in their adultery only begins the web of unfaithfulness that the play spins. Jerry and Emma’s affair becomes so extended and formalized that it generates its own set of expectations of fidelity between the adulterous couple. While their affair is in full swing, Jerry seems to take the news that Emma is pregnant with her own husband’s child as a kind of betrayal. Years after it has ended, Jerry remains “irritated” by the rumors of Emma’s new affair with Casey, his client. In this case, at least so he claims, Jerry’s irritation is a product of his own irrational jealousy, not toward Casey, but over the gossip this brief new affair has generated, while his own affair with Emma remained undetected for so long. On this point again, however, he has been betrayed: unbeknownst to Jerry, Emma revealed her affair with Jerry to Robert years earlier. In their final meeting (which begins the play), she lies yet again, telling Jerry she has just told Robert about the affair last night, as the two of them are getting divorced (partly because Robert himself, it turns out, has been carrying on affairs of his own for several years). Whereas Robert and Emma each in turn, as victims of cheating, suffer the classic shock of realizing they’ve been living in a lie, Jerry experiences an interesting inversion in discovering he’s been blithely unaware of his own adulterous exposure for the last several years of his friendship with Robert.
All these characters have been betrayed, and all arguably deserve it. Pinter suggests that this universal guilt is part of the nature of love, which is inextricable from jealousy. Jerry’s own lust for Emma stems from his jealousy of his best friend. When Emma reveals the affair, Robert says he’s always liked Jerry more than he likes her and “I should have had an affair with him myself.” The play seems to suggest, then, that Emma’s jealousy over Robert’s deeper affection for Jerry is what stoked her acceptance of Jerry’s advances in the first place. For Pinter, jealousy precedes love, and to love at all is already to betray.
Related Themes from Other Texts
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Love, Jealousy and Betrayal ThemeTracker
The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Love, Jealousy and Betrayal appears in each scene of Betrayal. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.
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Love, Jealousy and Betrayal Quotes in Betrayal
Below you will find the important quotes in Betrayal related to the theme of Love, Jealousy and Betrayal.
Scene 1
Quotes
EMMA: How’s Sam?
JERRY: You mean Judith.
EMMA: Do I?
JERRY: You remember the form. I ask about your husband, you ask about my wife.
EMMA: Yes, of course. How is your wife?
JERRY: All right.
Pause
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JERRY: The funny thing was that the only thing I really felt was irritation, I mean irritation that nobody gossiped about us like that, in the old days. I nearly said, now look, she may be having the occasional drink with Casey, who cares, but she and I had an affair for seven years and none of you bastards had the faintest idea it was happening.
Pause
EMMA: I wonder. I wonder if everyone knew, all the time.
JERRY: You didn’t tell Robert about me last night, did you?
EMMA: I had to.
Pause
He told me everything. I told him everything. We were up… all night. At one point Ned came down. I had to take him up to bed, had to put him back to bed. Then I went down again. I think it was the voices woke him up. You know…
[…]
JERRY: You told him everything… about us?
EMMA: I had to.
Pause
JERRY: But he’s my oldest friend. I mean, I picked his own daughter up in my own arms and threw her up and caught her, in my kitchen. He watched me do it.
EMMA: It doesn’t matter. It’s all gone.
Scene 2
Quotes
JERRY: The fact is I can’t understand… why she thought it necessary… after all these years… to tell you… so suddenly… last night…
ROBERT: Last night?
JERRY: Without consulting me. Without even warning me. After all, you and me…
ROBERT: She didn’t tell me last night.
JERRY: [Casey’s] over the hill
ROBERT: Is he?
JERRY: Don’t you think so?
ROBERT: In what respect?
JERRY: His work. His books.
ROBERT: Oh, his books. His art. Yes his art does seem to be falling away, doesn’t it?
JERRY: Still sells.
ROBERT: Oh, sells very well. Sells very well indeed. Very good for us. For you and me.
JERRY: Yes.
Scene 3
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JERRY: We’re here now.
EMMA: Not really.
JERRY: Well, things have changed. You’ve been so busy, your job, and everything.
EMMA: Well, I know. But I mean, I like it. I want to do it.
JERRY: No, it’s great. It’s marvellous for you. But you’re not—
EMMA: If you’re running a gallery you’ve got to run it, you’ve got to be there.
JERRY: But you’re not free in the afternoons. Are you?
EMMA No.
EMMA: It’s just… an empty home.
JERRY: It’s not a home.
Pause
I know… I know what you wanted… but it could never… actually be a home. You have a home. I have a home. With curtains, etcetera. And children. Two children in two homes. There are no children here, so it’s not the same kind of home.
Scene 4
Quotes
ROBERT: Well, to be brutally honest, we wouldn’t actually want a woman around, would we, Jerry? I mean a game of squash isn’t simply a game of squash, it’s rather more than that […] You really don’t want a woman within a mile of the place […] You see, at lunch you want to talk about squash, or cricket, or books, or even women, with your friend, and be able to warm to your theme without feat of improper interruption. That’s what it’s all about. What do you think, Jerry?
JERRY: I haven’t played squash for years.
Pause
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Scene 5
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[Jerry] used to write me at one time. Long letters about Ford Madox Ford. I used to write him too, come to think of it. Long letters about… oh, W.B. Yeats, I suppose. That was the time when we were both editors of poetry magazines. Him at Cambridge, me at Oxford. Did you know that? We were bright young men.
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I’ve always liked Jerry. To be honest, I’ve always liked him rather more than I’ve liked you. Maybe I should have had an affair with him myself.
Scene 6
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JERRY: Sam fell off his bike […] He was knocked out. He was out for about a minute.
EMMA: Were you with him?
JERRY: No. Judith. He’s all right. And then I got this bug.
Scene 7
Quotes
ROBERT: How are you? Apart from the bug?
JERRY: Fine.
ROBERT: Ready for some squash?
JERRY: When I’ve got rid of the bug, yes.
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I’m a bad publisher because I hate books […]. I mean modern novels, first novels and second novels, all that promise and sensibility it falls upon me to judge, to put the firm’s money on, and then to push for the third novel, see it done, see the dust jacket done, see the dinner for the national literary editors done, […] all in the name of literature. You know what you and Emma have in common? You love literature. I mean you love modern prose literature, I mean you love the new novel by the new Casey or Spinks. It gives you a thrill.
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Scene 8
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JERRY: Ginos? What the hell was she doing at Ginos?
EMMA: She was having lunch. With a woman.
JERRY: A woman?
EMMA: Yes.
Pause
JERRY: Ginos is a long way from the hospital.
EMMA: Of course it isn’t.
JERRY: Well… I suppose not.
Pause
And you?
EMMA: Me?
JERRY: What were you doing at Ginos?
EMMA: Having lunch.
JERRY: Yes, but with who?
Pause
EMMA: My sister.
JERRY: Ah.
Pause
EMMA: Have you ever been unfaithful?
JERRY: To whom?
EMMA: To me, of course.
JERRY: No.
Pause
Have you… to me?
EMMA: No.
Scene 9
Quotes
I should have had you in your white, before the wedding. I should have blackened you, in your white wedding dress, blackened you in your bridal dress, before ushering you into your wedding, as your best man.
[…] I’m madly in love with you. I can’t believe that what anyone is at this moment saying has ever happened has ever happened. Nothing has ever happened. Nothing. This is the only thing that has ever happened. Your eyes kill me. I’m lost. You’re wonderful
JERRY: I speak as your oldest friend. Your best man.
ROBERT: You are, actually.
