One of the ironies of dramatic irony is that you pretty much have to have it. Unless all the characters are on stage for the whole performance, then it’s inevitable that the audience knows more than the characters. That doesn’t happen in Shakespeare (though it may happen elsewhere) but Shakespeare does nevertheless make extensive and diverse use of the trope. In what follows I want to apply seven key features of dramatic irony to Shakespeare’s plays, to explore in detail its mechanics and the use he makes of them.
First, dramatic irony is about ignorance and knowledge. One or more characters knows more than the others, and they share this knowledge with the audience. Equally, one or more characters is ignorant, and they share their ignorance in just the same way. The one constant is the audience: they always know, and are never surprised. Characters like Richard III and Iago famously confide in their audiences – though as they share with us their schemes of murder and hatred, we are reluctant to hear what they have to say. Nevertheless, their plans only mature because of the ignorance of the other characters.
Second, though the characters in the know may, like Iago, be isolated, groups are just as likely to have privileged information as individuals. Take the group in “Twelfth Night” that persuades Malvolio that his mistress is in love with him. The audience share the amusement of Maria, Sir Toby and Sir Andrew, and delight in the gentle cruelty of the group that deceives and excludes the individual. Equally, ignorance may be collective: more or less all Iago’s acquaintances think he’s “honest”. Only the audience knows the truth.
Third, there are various types of privileged knowledge. It may be a trick (as on Malvolio), a lie (as to Othello), a disguise (Portia as Balthazar, Henry V before Agincourt, cloaked as an ordinary soldier, talking to his men), a secret (Juliet is not going to marry Paris, she’s already spoken for), or a performance (for example when Lady Macbeth welcomes Duncan to the castle where she means to have him murdered). But whichever type of knowledge it is, and whichever type of secret, the first point remains: some people know the truth, others don’t.
Conversely, there are various types of ignorance. Everybody may be fooled (as happens in “Othello”) or they may be fooled individually (Bassanio, for example, failing to recognise Portia). They may even fool themselves, like Leontes in “The Winter’s Tale”, the only character in the play who believes that his wife is unfaithful to him. They may equally believe they are in the know, but are wrong – the King in “King John”, desperate to believe that his nephew has survived (we know he hasn’t) or the Queen in “Cymbeline”, who thinks the drugs she gives Imogen will kill her. They won’t – Cornelius the doctor has made sure of that. The audience knows, the Queen doesn’t.
Fifth, these combinations of ignorance and knowledge will often have consequences for the narrative. True, these consequences may sometimes be benign: everyone laughs at Malvolio (a little cruelly, perhaps, but he’s probably asked for it), and everyone laughs at Falstaff when he calls Prince Hal “a shallow young fellow”, unaware that Hal is standing behind him, disguised as a waiter. More often the consequences are malign: Iago succeeds, Macbeth succeeds, and both depend on the ignorance of others.
Sixth, the ignorance / knowledge dynamic creates a tension that is time-limited. It is temporary because for better or worse the truth will emerge in the end. Audience reactions to the secrets they share may include anxiety (Iago may succeed), anticipation (Portia may solve the case – nobody else seems able to), unease (Leontes may never come to his senses), hope (Romeo and Juliet may one day be proudly man and wife), or fear (Don John may avoid exposure in “Much Ado”). Anxiety, anticipation, unease, hope, fear: it’s striking how many of the emotions evoked by dramatic irony seem connected to the future.
Seventh, revelation and exposure seem inevitable. The situation is temporary because it’s unstable. The play will not end without the secret emerging or the disguise being exposed. The audience don’t want to go home without first finding out that Iago was rumbled, Macbeth defeated and (it’s a versatile trope) Falstaff deterred from pursuing married women in “The Merry Wives of Windsor”. Shakespeare rarely asks his audience to take his characters’ secrets home with them.
Now a confession, or rather, an exception: earlier I suggested that the audience always knows. But this isn’t quite the whole story. Very occasionally there are times when Shakespeare exploits our self-confidence to challenge our complacency. When in 1606 the audience at the Globe queued up to watch “King Lear”, they felt they knew the story because an earlier version, entitled “Leir”, had been seen by a previous generation. In that version, the King’s third daughter Cordelia is reconciled to her father in the end, so no doubt the audience could now relax and anticipate a relatively happy ending. But Shakespeare was never one to confirm us in our prejudices and expectations, and in this version of the story, Cordelia breathes her last in her father’s arms. Dramatic irony withdrawn: we thought we knew and we were wrong. Plenty of his characters have felt the same way.
More generally, dramatic irony has the effect of bringing the audience into the action. Bear in mind that Shakespeare was an actor before he was a playwright, and was always prodding, provoking, stimulating and indeed challenging his audience. But this trope brings with it a sub-text, not much to our credit, perhaps. Dramatic irony says that human beings are in the habit of making decisions on the back of inadequate knowledge or half-understood information. It suggests that we jump to conclusions and are easily deceived – “honest Iago” – and implies that we believe what we want to believe – Malvolio “cross-garter’d”, or Capulet arranging his daughter’s wedding to Paris when we’ve known since line six (“A pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life”) that there are going to be funerals, not weddings. There again, it’s out of our human weaknesses and foibles that Shakespeare’s literature is made, and these seven ingredients of dramatic irony comprise one of his most engaging methods of expressing that.
