Dramatic Irony

William Shakespeare
King Lear
First Published 1608


I would love to link a free version of King Lear from Amazon Kindle Store, unfortunately they do not have one! All the versions in English of King Lear are .99 cents and up. Fortunately, you can download from these sources:

• Magic Catalog. If you have this on your kindle you can just search the book and download directly. If not click the link for a guide on installing it.
• Project Gutenberg
• Feedbooks
• Manybooks.net
• The Internet Archives

Inkmesh is a great source for finding eBooks. Inkmesh is a search engine for eBooks. I used it to find free versions of King Lear. You can search specifically for free eBooks and it will search multiple databases including the kindle store and Project Gutenberg.


King Lear is a tragedy written by Bill Shakespeare. After spending the last six months studying fourteen of his plays, I feel like I am on a first name basis with Bill. I read all the plays on my Kindle. The play explores social and moral notions of justice and whether they are possible in a natural world. King Lear is retiring and is leaving everything to this three daughters. When the good one, Cordelia, decides not to play to his ego she is removed from the inheritance. The two older sisters divide the land and come to hate their father. The tragedy is that King Lear abandons his only loving daughter and the other daughters come to abandon him. The two daughters eventually fight over Edmund, a grand villain written by Shakespeare, and come to a bad end.

Tragedy n.
any dramatic or literary composition dealing with serious or sombre themes and ending with disaster.

Or as my Professor calls them, “plays where everyone dies at the end.” There are a few survivors in King Lear. With Shakespeare, the ending is not the important part, it is the journey he takes us through. We read Shakespeare for the human insight and depth of character’s psychological development. Freud loved reading Shakespeare because his characters were so complex and well developed.


Edmund is one of the vilest villains created by Shakespeare. He has a great soliloquy in Act 1 Scene 2 where he tells us how he feels about being called the bastard son and his brother the legitimate one. He tells us his plan to turn his father against his older brother Edgar with a letter and how he feels of everyone that is not made out of passion.

As to th’ legitimate. Fine word, “legitimate”!
Well, my legitimate, if this letter speed
And  my invention thrive, Edmund the base
Shall top th’ legitimate. I grow, I prosper.
Now, gods, stand up for bastards!

Shakespeare uses this soliloquy to build Dramatic Irony.

Dramatic Irony n.
irony that is inherent in speeches or a situation of a drama and is understood by the audience but not grasped by the characters in the play.

We, the reader/audience, know the intentions of the character in the play. The other characters on the stage are unaware of what he is doing. Now when Edmund says something on stage there will be multiple meanings to it. We know what his plans are but his father thinks he is a great son for telling him what is going on. The audience can see what he is doing with the letter and and have mixed emotions about the character. We don't want him to succeed but we can’t do anything about it. He is telling us what he plans to do and we can see everything he does with a different understanding.


The Dramatic Irony in Shakespeare’s comedies is even more complex. When you have boys dressing as girls who are pretending to be boys, the meaning of their lines is quite complex. When a boy who’s really a girl played by a boy is being courted by a man starts talking about who we really are, on stage, talking about plays while acting, well you really don’t know how to take it besides to laugh.


King Lear is a great play about the tragic situation of a man who loses everything he once loved. Ian McKellen does a great job in the 2009 version of King Lear. Read the play then watch the movie. The characters in this play are very interesting. I now contradict myself! The last scene, where Lear walks in carrying a dead Cordelia, is gut wrenching. The scene gets it's emotional power because of everything that Lear has gone through. 


This is the second post in my Shakespeare series. Certain terms need to be explained in order to be able to understand the plays better. A soliloquy leads to dramatic irony in many plays. Understanding what certain scenes are helps in reading that scene. If you see a character come on stage alone you know he will give you information that only you will know for the rest of the play. You have to pay special attention to soliloquies to understand the multiple meanings of what they say later on.


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