Dramatic Irony In Much Ado About Nothing

Dramatic Irony: How it will change your literary world

Dramatic irony is a literary technique that is most commonly prevalent in greek tragedies. Dramatic Irony is used to generate suspense with the reader and to let the reader in on a minutiae of knowledge that most characters don't know yet. Lemony snicket the very knowledgeable and well known author of The Series of Unfortunate Events has a great example of Dramatic Irony, “Simply put, dramatic irony is when a person makes a harmless remark, and someone else who hears it knows something that makes the remark have a different, and usually unpleasant, meaning. For instance, if you were in a restaurant and said out loud, "I can't wait to eat the veal marsala I ordered," and there were people around who knew that the veal marsala was poisoned and that you would die as soon as you took a bite, your situation would be one of dramatic irony.” The well known Comedy, Much Ado About Nothing, written by the acclaimed author, poet, and thespian William Shakespeare uses many examples of Dramatic irony throughout the play. The uses of this literary device help to bring suspence

This will give us an additional piece of insight into the scene so the audience knows what could happen but other characters are oblivious to what will happen. “Bait the hook well. This fish will bite” ( Shakespeare 35). In this scene the men are bamboozling Benedick, he is hiding in the bushes overhearing this conversation and receiving bogus information about Beatrice’s love for him. The readers are aware that this is a gimmick and they get to watch Benidick fall into this trap blindly like a lamb to the slaughter. The knowledge of this being a trap helps to further advance the comedic feature of this play. The audience follows along with the scene with the knowledge of this joke, which makes Benedick’s new found happiness even more