Harold Pinter's Shakespearean Funeral

Harold Pinter was buried yesterday afternoon before a small gathering of family and friends at Kensal Green cemetery in London. And, if the half-hour ceremony conducted around the graveside had a deeply moving, faintly Shakespearean and entirely secular quality to it, it was because Pinter himself had wished it that way.

As recently as last August, he had sat down with his wife, Antonia Fraser, and selected the readings he wanted for his funeral.

Since the chosen pieces dealt with memory, mortality, passion, politics and cricket, they not only reflected Pinter's abiding concerns: they also showed his extraordinary capacity, even in death, to make his presence manifest.

Read the whole story here.

Comments

[ladyrefined2000]

in ten years, no one will remember him.......­..........­.....who cares!!!!!!

[rmetz74]

I very seriously doubt that.

[rmetz74]

His work was a great help and inspiration to me through my acting training. He will me dearly missed, but long remembered.

[pbfishtaco]

Please, take the time to listen to, or read Mr. Pinter's speech on the occasion of his 2005 Nobel Prize. I listened to excerpts on Democracy Now, and was moved. He was too ill to come to Sweden to accept, and his voice was rough, but the words ring true now, more than ever.

http://nobelprize.org/mediaplayer/index.php?id=620

[TheBaffler]

I would have liked to have been there. He was a great talent, and this sounds like a fitting service.

[brooklyncitizen]

Very moving. His acceptance speech when he won the Noble is a gift to all of us.