Dramatic Irony In Shakespeares plays - Essay Example

?Dramatic irony in Shakespeare’s plays: Irony has been frequently used in the literature since the times of antiquity when it was the job of the chorus to tell the audience certain facts which the characters did not know as in ancient tragedy Oedipus Rex. This style of storytelling not only fuels the readers’ curiosity and interest as to what actions will be taken by the characters in their ignorance as the story unfolds, but also makes a significant contribution towards story’s success. This is true because irony is found to be the main force behind success of many darkest and most memorable Shakespeare’s plays like Hamlet, Julius Caesar, and Romeo & Juliet all of which will be scrutinized and explored in this essay. In Hamlet near the end, the fact that Gertrude is about to drink the wine that Claudius has poisoned is obvious to Claudius and the audience, but Gertrude unaware of the conspiracy drinks it anyway to rebel against Claudius and dies. In Julius Caesar, Brutus engineers schemes to kill Caesar while pretending to be his friend, but Caesar is oblivious to the reality while the audience knows. In Romeo & Juliet, the audience knows that Juliet has only taken sleeping potion to avoid getting married, but Romeo drinks the poison believing Juliet to be dead and instead dies himself. “Dramatic irony of this kind is found throughout Shakespeare’s plays” (Frye 208). Hamlet is the name of the Shakespearean play which dramatizes the revenge sought by Prince Hamlet and the tragic journey undertaken by him to fulfill his incentives. Claudius is the brother and murderer of King Hamlet and Prince Hamlet’s uncle. Claudius succeeds to the throne and marries his dead brother’s wife Gertrude. This painful sequence of events instills a maddening desire of revenge in Hamlet’s heart who fakes madness to punish Claudius. While the audience knows that this is only feigned madness and not remotely related to actual psychological issue, other characters in the play are oblivious to this and make misleading assumptions. Polonius is one of the ignorant characters who also happens to be the most trusted confidant of Claudius. Polonius’s daughter Ophelia cherishes love for Hamlet in her heart but is disturbed after one night in Act II Scene I, Hamlet breaks into her room, merely stares at her, and leaves having said nothing. She reports this highly strange event to her father who unaware of the fact that madness is just a facade worn by Hamlet to exact revenge on Claudius falsely believes the act of Hamlet to be the natural result of ecstasy of love for Ophelia. While the readers are perfectly aware of how the situation actually stands, dramatic irony is that Polonius being naive fails to grasp the depth of the highly complicated issue and makes false assumptions. Actually, Hamlet uses Ophelia to convey this message to others that his insanity is not due to any suspicious reason but because of the abundance of love he has for Ophelia. While this is done by Hamlet in an attempt to allay the doubts of Claudius and lull him into believing he is safe, dramatic irony is that only the readers know what is actually going underneath the surface while other characters do not. So, what makes the Shakespearean tragedy ever more riveting and enthralling is the only the readers know that Hamlet never actually loved Ophelia but only used her as a pawn with an incentive to checkmate Claudius, the murderer of his father. While both Claudius and Gertrude are perplexed and baffled by Hamlet’s increasingly eccentric activities and fail to comprehend the matter, it is made evident to the readers that nothing but seething revenge for Claudius actually boils underneath the charade of madness played up by Hamlet. Another benchmark example of dramatic irony in Hamlet is when the duel is about to happen between Hamlet and Laertes at the King’s court in Act V Scene II. The King summons both Hamlet and Laertes to the court and has them being the duel. Claudius convinced of Hamlet’s original intentions by now, devises a vindictive scheme of removing Hamlet from his way by poisoning his wine. Gertrude also watches the fight but is uninformed of her husband’s vicious plot and at one moment, gets up to offer Hamlet the wine that is poisoned by Claudius as a gesture of motherly affection and kindness. Hamlet, however, refuses which makes Gertrude toast him instead. Claudius exasperated at the unexpected turn of events attempts in vain to keep Gertrude from drinking the wine but she finally decides to resolutely stand in support of her son and refuses to obey Claudius. It is highly ironic that when Gertrude decides to support Hamlet by raising a toast oblivious to Claudius’s scheme, the wine kills her instantly. The effect of dramatic irony on Gertrude subjects her to fatal poisoning while Hamlet is also left to die because he is hit by the poisoned sword of Laertes. While the readers know that the tip of Laertes’s sword is deliberately poisoned so that he could be killed, Hamlet is clueless and dies in the end. Because the readers know that wine was poisoned by the king in an attempt to kill Hamlet actually but which becomes the source of sorrowful death of Gertrude instead and that the sword used by Laertes was poisoned, they are affected even more by the stinging effect of dramatic irony and tragic turn of events. Julius Caesar is another widely popular and ever green Shakespearean tragedy which like other plays, is riddled with enormously effectual use and examples of dramatic irony. Like in case of Hamlet, here the use of irony also plays an unmistakable role in fuelling the story’s success for ever among all age groups. Dramatic irony continues to be a fixture throughout the story as while the conniving and malicious intentions of Marcus Brutus are no secret to the readers, Caesar never stops to second guess his habit of blindly trusting Brutus which causes him to pay a huge price as the story progresses. Throughout the play, the readers are aware of the main driving forces behind the plot to murder Caesar but he himself is utterly naive and blindly puts faith in Brutus who is his closest ally and the most prominent Roman praetor. While Caesar trusts Brutus with his ideas and decisions and regularly confides in him, Brutus turns into a snake in the grass and deliberately joins a group of conspirators affected by the growing suspicion among Roman senators that Caesar intends to transform Rome into absolute monarchy under his emperorship alone. This suspicion is implanted in Brutus’s head by Cassius, who is the leading instigator and brother-in-law of Brutus, in an attempt to make the plot against Caesar flawless as no one among Roman commanders or magistrates was closest to the Roman dictator but Brutus. It is unequivocal reality that the persistent use of irony in the play till the end adds a fixating element of tension in the story and principally manages to grab the spellbound audience’s attention. Calpurnia is the wife of Caesar and before he is assassinated by conspirators at the Capitol, she narrates a strange dream to her husband. Caesar due to his habit of confiding everything in Brutus shares his wife’s dream with him saying that Calpurnia saw my statue which like a prodigious fountain with a hundred spouts sprayed fresh blood with many lusty and power-hungry Romans approaching the statue smiling and beginning to bath their hands in the pure bloodbath. Caesar explains how Calpurnia tried to make him stay at home and abandon his plan of attending the meeting with other Roman senators. However Brutus, blinded by the frenetic impulse shared with other senators to overthrow Caesar and his dictatorship, offers an optimistic explanation of the highly ominous dream saying that it is a sign of prosperity that your statue spouted blood in many pipes with many Romans approaching it smiling and happily bathing in it. Great irony is that while the readers know that Brutus is clearly lying when telling Caesar that Calpurnia’s dream signifies nothing but that Roman empire will suck reviving blood from his statue and flourish ever faster, Caesar himself knows nothing of the conspiracy planned by Brutus and other senators and having taken to his heart whatever he is told, heads to the Capitol. Also, Brutus himself in the beginning is unwilling to betray his friend but after growing public support which is actually faked by Cassius, who writes letters to Brutus in different handwritings to get him betray Caesar, he succumbs to the pressure. This is also ironic that while the readers know that the letters reaching Brutus apparently sent from public are actually faked by Cassius, he himself knows nothing of the situation and believes the letters. Such artistic use of irony in Julius Caesar successfully manages in influencing Brutus to participate in the conspiracy, compelling Caesar to head to the Capitol despite having been warned, and creating suspense in the story till the end. Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy considered by many to be the most widely popular and definitely the most adapted Shakespearean play to date. The way Shakespeare controls dramatic irony throughout the play and balances it against the ups and downs of the story is just over the top mesmerizing and astonishing. This literary tool manages to accentuate drama and suspense in the story which keeps the audience and readers engaged till the end. There is such a huge collection of dramatic irony examples in the play that tension and anticipation never expires. One example is found early on in the play when Romeo after just being secretly wed to Juliet with the aid of Friar Lawrence arrives to see Benvolio and Mercutio who happen to be his cousins. He witnesses them having an argument with Tybalt and other Capulets. Montague and Capulet families share years of animosity with each other. When Tybalt who is a Capulet declares that he wants to fight with none else but Romeo who is a Montague, it is quite ironic because Romeo is actually married to a Capulet (Juliet) and since Romeo and Tybalt are now relatives they cannot be having a duel with each other. However, while Romeo and the audience know what is happening, Tybalt and other characters remain naive and are surprised when Romeo refuses to accept the challenge thinking of Tybalt as his kinsman now. While this response leaves Tybalt confused, irony is that the audience is aware of the reasons behind Romeo's decline. But, Mercutio accepts the duel and after being fatally wounded, Romeo fueled with grief and guilt slays Tybalt. The suspense in this scene is poisonous and the effect of dramatic irony on Mercutio and Tybalt ends in turmoil with the death of Tybalt at hands of Romeo. The Shakespearean tragedy of Romeo and Juliet is fraught with extremely clever and outstanding use of irony which never fails to inflict a poignant and drastic impact on both the characters of the plays and the readers. While Lady Capulet believes Juliet to be depressed over the death of her cousin Tybalt, irony is that she actually mourns over her separation from Romeo. However, the most powerful and darkest example of dramatic irony is found near the end of Romeo and Juliet when though Juliet and Friar’s plan to avoid marriage to Count Paris seems to go as expected, but a misunderstanding results in two tragic deaths. The messenger sent by Friar to Romeo to tell him that Juliet is only faking death never reaches him and instead he learns from Balthasar that Juliet is dead lying in the Capulet’s tomb. The discrepancy in this scene between what Romeo believes to be true and what the audience is aware of is in particular powerful and is set to bring a spiraling decline to the plot. Romeo overwhelmed by grief buys poison and goes to the Capulet crypt to join Juliet. The journey of dramatic irony reaches its extreme here when Romeo believing Juliet to be dead drinks the potion and dies. Juliet then awakens and in desperation asks Friar where Romeo is. After discovering the tragic end to Romeo's life, she uses his dagger to end her own life. While Romeo never receives the enlightening letter from Friar but is instead told that Juliet is dead and when Juliet keeps thinking that the plan is going as expected, both of them are clueless about the actual state of the affairs unlike the audience. Hence, the way in which dramatic irony is portrayed in this scene by Shakespeare is absolutely priceless yet saddest. Summing up, this much becomes clear from the above discussion that all three epic Shakespeare’s tragedies are riddled with myriad powerful examples of dramatic irony. It is suggested that most profound, explicit, and influential examples of dramatic irony can be effortlessly found in William Shakespeare’s plays. It is no mystification that dramatic irony is a literary tool for which Shakespeare is widely famous. General consensus is that dramatic irony is unmistakably one of the most powerful and expressive tools in storytelling which also quite effectively puts the readers in the dominant position because while they acutely know how the matters really stand, the characters are absolutely clueless. Ingenious and enthralling use of dramatic irony is an art which Shakespeare was definitely a master at and which he frequently deftly called to his aid to help him craft unforgettable larger-than-life tragedies. Work cited: Frye, Roland Mushat. Shakespeare: The Art Of The Dramatist. Great Britain: Routledge, 2005. Print. Read More