pdf notes on Shakespearean irony
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▶One of the most effective of dramatic devices is the use of "irony." The essential idea of "irony" is double dealing, as when some speech has a double meaning -- the obvious one which all perceive -- and the cryptic which only certain of the hearers understand. And "irony" of fate or circumstances is a sort of double dealing by which Destiny substitutes for what we might expect just the opposite, the unexpected, thing.
▶This "irony" of the broader kind informs Macbeth's later relations (iv. i) with the Witches, in that through them revelations are made from which he anticipates certain results, whereas it happens that precisely the opposite results accrue to him.
▶But understood in the more limited sense in which "irony" is used as a dramatic term, it may be said, roughly, to lie in the difference between the facts as known to the audience and as imagined by the characters of the play or by some of them. Macbeth is remarkable beyond any other of Shakespeare's plays for the frequency and power of its tragic "irony."
▶This "irony" of the broader kind informs Macbeth's later relations (iv. i) with the Witches, in that through them revelations are made from which he anticipates certain results, whereas it happens that precisely the opposite results accrue to him.
▶But understood in the more limited sense in which "irony" is used as a dramatic term, it may be said, roughly, to lie in the difference between the facts as known to the audience and as imagined by the characters of the play or by some of them. Macbeth is remarkable beyond any other of Shakespeare's plays for the frequency and power of its tragic "irony."
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