Dramatic irony is when the audience or reader knows the words and actions of the characters in a work of literature, but certain characters in the story do not know them. The reader or audience has a greater knowledge of many of the characters themselves. Shakespeare employs dramatic irony in many of his tragedies; so that the audience is engaged, and so they are able to witness characters errors in their action, predict the fate of the characters, and experience feelings of tragedy and grief. As
The Canterbury Tales, written by the Father of English Poetry, Geoffrey Chaucer, is a poem based around twenty-nine pilgrims, as well as the narrator, who are going on a pilgrimage to Canterbury for prayer. The Prologue frames the tales of the characters like a picture, with the tales acting as the photograph. Each character’s tale is explained in their point of view, holding a moral behind each tale. In Geoffrey Chaucer’s poem, The Canterbury Tales, he borrows central ideas from his time period
at the outset of the drama, there is irony exhibited in the manner in which Shakespeare characterizes King Claudius – he is simply the perfect ruler – and yet, shortly hereafter when the ghost appears, he is revealed as a truly evil sort. George Lyman Kittredge, in his book, Five Plays of Shakespeare, describes the Bard’s excellent characterization of Claudius: King Claudius is a superb figure – almost as great a dramatic creation as Hamlet himself. His intellectual powers are of the highest
his society. Works Cited Chaucer, Geoffrey (1987). “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue.” The Riverside Chaucer, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 105-116. Hammond, Eleanor Prescott (1908). Chaucer: A Bibliographic Manual. New York: Macmillan. Kittredge, George Lyman. "Chaucer's Discussion of Marriage." Modern Philology 9 (1912), 435-67. Carter, Susan. "Coupling the Beastly Bride and the Hunter Hunted: What Lies Behind The Wife of Bath's Tale." Chaucer Review, Vol. 37 No. 4 (2003), 329-345.
William Shakespeare’s creation of the character of Hamlet within the tragedy of that name left open the question of whether the madness of the protagonist is entirely feigned or not. This essay will treat this aspect of the drama. George Lyman Kittredge in the Introduction to The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, explains the lack of success with Hamlet’s pretended insanity, and in so doing he implies that the madness is entirely feigned and not real: The necessity for some device
Imagination. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980. Carruthers, Mary. "The Wife of Bath and the Painting of Lions." PMLA 94 (1979): 209-22. Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. Ed. Daniel Cook. Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1961. Kittredge, George Lyman. "Chaucer's Discussion of Marriage." PMLA 9 (1911-12). http://icg.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer/ canttales/franklin/marriage.html Lee, Brian S. "Exploitation and Excommunication in 'The Wife of Bath's Tale.'" Philological Quarterly 74 (1996):
Bloom, Harold, ed. Introduction. Modern Critical Interpretations: William Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1988. ---. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. New York: Riverhead Books, 1998. Kittredge, George Lyman. Introduction. Antony and Cleopatra. By William Shakespeare. Waltham, MA: Blaisdell Publishing Company, 1966. Markels, Julian. The Pillar of the World: Antony and Cleopatra in Shakespeare's Development. Ohio: Ohio State University Press
Dramatic irony in the Shakespearean tragedy Hamlet has long been the subject matter of literary critical reviews. This essay will exemplify and elaborate on the irony in the play. David Bevington in the Introduction to Twentieth Century Interpretations of Hamlet identifies one of the “richest sources of dramatic irony” in Hamlet: Well may the dying Hamlet urge his friend Horatio to “report me and my cause aright To the unsatisfied,” for no one save Horatio has caught more than a glimpse of
Barnes and Noble, 1971. Schiesari, Juliana. The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992. Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Ed. George Lyman Kittredge. Boston: Ginn and Company, 1939.
Arthur's Unrealism: Monty Python, Gawain and the Green Knight, and the Destruction of Ideals It may be that ideals are necessary for humanity. Without idealized images, codes of behavior, even idealized objects, mankind would have difficulty functioning. There would be a lack of context or criteria with which to judge objects that may be termed less than ideal. However, the problem with idealized images is that they can never be described fully, and certainly never attained. An example is the
Bloom, Harold, ed. Introduction. Modern Critical Interpretations: William Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1988. ---. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. New York: Riverhead Books, 1998. Kittredge, George Lyman. Introduction. Antony and Cleopatra. By William Shakespeare. Waltham, MA: Blaisdell Publishing Company, 1966. Markels, Julian. The Pillar of the World: Antony and Cleopatra in Shakespeare's Development. Ohio: Ohio State University Press
Denmark seems to indicate the necessity for the idea of the Renaissance hero to evolve further before it can become a viable replacement for its precursor. Works Cited Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Ed. George Lyman Kittredge. Waltham, MA: Xerox, 2008.
Bloom, Harold, ed. Introduction. Modern Critical Interpretations: William Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1988. ---. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. New York: Riverhead Books, 1998. Kittredge, George Lyman. Introduction. Antony and Cleopatra. By William Shakespeare. Waltham, MA: Blaisdell Publishing Company, 1966. Markels, Julian. The Pillar of the World: Antony and Cleopatra in Shakespeare's Development. Ohio: Ohio State University Press
Witchcraft, Insanity, and the Ten Signs of Decay Since there never was a spurned lover stirring things up in Salem Village, and there is no evidence from the time that Tituba practiced Caribbean black magic, yet these trials and executions actually still took place, how can you explain why they occurred? The Salem Witchcraft Trials began not as an act of revenge against an ex-lover, as they did in The Crucible, but as series of seemingly unlinked, complex events, which a paranoid and scared group
Measure For Measure on the Stage Near the end of his well known treatment of transgression and surveillance in Measure for Measure, Jonathan Dollimore makes an observation about the world of the play that deserves further consideration by feminist scholars: the prostitutes, the most exploited group in the society which the play represents, are absent from it. Virtually everything that happens presupposes them yet they have no voice, no presence. And those who speak for them do so as exploitatively