William Shakespeare and Irony

William Shakespeare was as fond as any great playwright of the power of dramatic irony: His comedies especially are thickly strewn with it as the plots of plays like As You Like It and Twelfth Night depend on silly plot devices that can only be maintained through a heavy reliance on ironic understandings between the dramatist and the audience. Such an understanding in the comedic plays allows us to appreciate the fallibility of humanity. Shakespeare relies less heavily on irony in the tragedies, although in both Macbeth and Hamlet (and especially in the latter) the playwright has relied on the use of dramatic irony both to heighten the sense of suspense in the play and to call into question the fitness of both Hamlet and Claudius to serve as king.

If we are only generally familiar with the play, we are likely to think about Hamlet as being the hero of the play that bears his name. He is, after all, the man who risks his own safety and even sanity to achieve vengeance for his father and even more importantly, he is the figure who serves to bring a sense of both order and justice back to the land of Denmark. And yet, if we read the play more closely, if becomes increasingly clear to us that while there are certainly some heroic qualities about Hamlet, he is also clearly at least partially responsible for a number of the terrible events that occur in the play.

Shakespeare uses dramatic irony in Hamlet in a number of different ways. At the most superficial level, irony is used

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the line of succession in Denmark in the Middle Ages was one of male primogeniture, and so Hamlet, as Gertrude's adult son, should have been placed on the throne as soon as his father died. The fact that he was not suggests that there is a generally consensus that he is not fit to rule (Vaughan 82). Claudius and Gertrude alone are unlikely to have had the power to disrupt the line of succession without the at-least implicit consent of the court. Once we accept this fact, the entire play reads very differently. We see the psychological dueling that takes place between Hamlet and Claudius (a duel that favors first one and then the other, although one in which Claudius gradually tires and begins consistently to lose) as not simply an attempt for Claudius to keep power because he himself is enamored of it. Rather, and this is the fundamental irony of the play, extending across all acts, we see Claudius as both murderer and hero, a man who has committed regicide to save the nation from the rule of a prince who cannot be trusted to rule wisely. Claudius may be disqualified as a good ruler on the grounds that he has killed a man (and certainly Shakespeare does suggest that this is a terrible thing to have done). But Hamlet is also disq

Category: Literature - W