Fowler on Irony

 

Irony is a form of utterance that postulates a double audience, consisting of one party that hearing  shall hear and shall not understand and another party that, when more is meant than meets the ear, is aware of that more and of the outsiders incomprehension.

1.      Socratic  irony was a profession of ignorance.  What Socrates represented as an ignorance and a weakness in himself was in fact a non-committal attitude towards any dogma, however accepted or imposing, that had not been carried back to and shown to be based on first principles.  The two parties in his audience were, first, the dogmatists moved by pity or contempt to enlighten this ignorance, and secondly, those who knew their Socrates and set themselves to watch the familiar game in which learning should be turned out by simplicity.

2.      The double audience is essential also to what is called dramatic irony i.e. the irony of the Greek drama. That drama had the peculiarity of providing the double audience – one party in the secret and the other not- in a special manner.  The facts of most Greek plays were not a matter of invention, but were part of every Athenian child’s store of legend; all the spectators, that is, were in the secret beforehand of what would happen.  But the characters Pentheus and Oedipus and the rest, were in the dark; one of them might utter words that to him and his companions on the stage were of trifling import, but to those who hearing could understand were pregnant with the coming doom.  The surface meaning for the dramatis personae, and the underlying one for the spectators; the dramatist working his effect by irony. (from Fowler’s Modern English Usage)