King Lear by W. Shakespeare and A Brave New World by A. Huxley Essay

King Lear by W. Shakespeare and A Brave New World by A. Huxley - Essay Example This research will begin with the statement that irony, or what happens when something is said, or done, and what happens is the opposite of what was supposed to happen is found in â€Å"King Lear† by Shakespeare, and â€Å"A Brave New World† by Albert Huxley, in more than one place, and in more than one form. In King Lear, a King that does not wish to be King any more splits his kingdom between his three daughters and then attempts to retire. Unfortunately, in splitting his kingdom, he has made a big mistake and must accept the penalty that comes with it. Joining the Lear family is the Earl of Gloucester, with his two sons, Edgar and Edmund, one who is the legal heir to the house, and the other that wants it because he thinks he should have it. In A Brave New World, society is no longer brave, or new, or true to each other. Instead, it has been replaced with a system that, from top to bottom, ensures only the good of what is known as the world-state, but not any one pe rson in it. Throughout both of these stories, there is what is known as spoken irony, or a character saying something opposite of what was meant as they were saying it. There is also irony in different situations when what actually happens is the opposite or different from what someone set out to do. Finally, there is also dramatic irony, when the characters end up doing something that may come back to haunt them. Irony happens right away in the first scenes of King Lear in the form of dramatic irony when Lear commits a rather large error that will cost him dearly.... Though the words of the other two daughters could be used as verbal, or spoken, irony in this case, it is the interaction between Cordelia and Lear that puts the biggest irony on the scene. Dramatic irony happens again right after this when Edmund, the bastard son of Gloucester, schemes to have what he feels he deserves. He says, â€Å"Wherefore should I stand in the plague of custom/and permit the curiosity of nations to deprive me/for that I am some twelve or fourteen moon-shines lag of a brother?† (I.ii. 2-6). Edmund plans to take what he wants, even though he is not the rightful heir, and now everyone reading knows this, but everyone else around him in the play has not been informed. Another example of dramatic irony happens in A Brave New World. Linda, the mother of the savage, tells Bernard and Lenina that her son had a father named â€Å"Tomakin† (Huxley 182). Huxley even tells the readers that â€Å"Yes, Thomas was the D.H.C.’s first name† (Huxley 182). The readers know, then, that the Director actually fathered a child. He had been seen almost from page one telling students and new workers to the central hatchery â€Å"for you must remember, in those days of gross viviparous production, children were always brought up by their parents and not in state conditioning centers† (Huxley 38). It is ironic that the Direct of the Central Hatcheries actually had sex with emotional involvement and fathered a child when he claims that the whole process is â€Å"gross† and a thing of the past. Situational irony, or a situation in which the opposite effect happens than intended, occurs so many times in both of these stories that examples must be chosen, and not listed.