ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at irony in action. A rhetorician dogged enough could probably identify as many ways of being ironical as there are ways of using words. The chapter suggests that irony is essentially both theatrical and dramatic though in some respects only in a weak sense. The irony involved in the plays that draw attention, explicitly or implicitly, to their status as play, to their illusory nature, is Romantic Irony. In Romantic Irony the inherent limitation of art, the inability of a work of art, as something created, fully to capture and represent the complex and dynamic creativity of life is itself imaginatively raised to consciousness by being given thematic recognition. Internalizations of playwrights and directors without their plays are less obvious because in such cases they enter the play not as playwright or director but metaphorically only, as manipulators of the lives of others.
