What is dramatic irony?

Dramatic Irony is when the audience or the reader is aware of information a character in the story is not.

For example in The Tempest, Miranda is unaware Gonzalo is with her on the island. The audience however learn this early.

Dramatic irony is a literary technique where it is clear to the audience or the reader what the character is saying or doing by it is unknown to the other characters

It is a literary technique to keep the audience engaged that is normally applied in films, books or plays. In which the character is unaware of the scenario but the audience is not. A good exmaple of dramatic irony can be seen in William Shakespeare's plays A Midsomer Nights Dream , Othello and Romeo and Juliet.

Hi Justice, it's a technique. It's when the audience knows something that the characters on stage don't know because they learned something that the characters didn't. For example, maybe the audience saw a scene where a killer was preparing to kill someone. After the death, the audience knows who the killer is but the characters on stage investigating the death don't know who the killer was. Writers use it a lot in their plays and screen writers use it a lot too. Most of the time it is used to create suspense and tension.

Hi Justice! Dramatic irony is a literary technique often used to create tension and/ or suspense. It is where the audience is aware of information that is unknown to the character/s

Dramatic irony is when the audience or readers know more about a situation than the character does.

Dramatic Irony occurs in a text when we (the reader) know something that the characters in the text do not.

Dramatic irony is when the audience or reader knows more than a character.

Think about how Priestley effectively uses irony through Mr Birling's speech in Act 1 of his play, 'An Inspector Calls'. Priestley evokes dramatic irony when he makes Mr Birling say all the wrong predictions of the outcomes of events, i.e. the Titanic and the wars, in his speech.

Examples of the direct quotes:

1) The Titanic is "unsinkable, absolutely unsinkable." (Later that year, 1912, when the play was set the Titanic sinks when it hit an iceberg causing at least 1,500 deaths.)

2) "The Germans don't want war. Nobody wants war..." (Of course, the two world wars happen soon after the book was set, from 1914...)

Hi there!

Dramatic irony occurs in everyday life when a situation is happening and yet the person within the situation is unaware of what is occurring.

For example, if a person were to be mocking a friend for losing his wallet, but did not realize that he had also lost his own wallet, this would be dramatic irony.

This is a literary device in which the audience/reader has an understanding of the events or a character's actions before the characters know.

Dramatic irony is the expression used to describe a situation in which the audience in a movie is aware of something the characters aren’t.

In literature, dramatic irony occurs when the audience knows something that the characters don't. For example: In the classic myth of Oedipus, Oedipus leaves his family because it has been foretold that he will kill his father and marry his mother. Oedipus doesn't know, however, that he was adopted.

Dramatic Irony is a literary device used by an author or a playwright where the reader/audience knows something is going to happen before the characters do. For example, a character on stage might say the line "I'm going to live forever!", but the scene before it could show other characters plotting to kill said character by putting poison in his wine. The audience knows he won't live forever. Shakespeare's plays are full of dramatic irony!

Dramatic irony is simply when the audience or reader knows something, and a character does not! The point of this technique is to draw the audience into the story, and to create more tension. A fantastic example of dramatic irony is in Shakespeare's 'Macbeth', when the naive King Duncan thanks Lady Macbeth for her hospitality inviting him into her home, when the audience knows she is plotting to murder her guest!

Dramatic irony is a literary device usually found in plays, where an author reveals information to the audience but the characters are unaware of this information. An example of this is in Act One of An Inspector Calls when Mr Birling describes the Titanic as 'unsinkable' yet the audience in 1945/6 knows the Titanic sank in 1912.