SOURCE: “Pinter and the New Irony,” in The Quarterly Journal of Speech, Vol. 55, No. 4, December, 1969, pp. 388-93.

In the following essay, Morrison argues that Pinter developed a new form of dramatic irony, not the classical irony where the audience knows things the characters do not, but an irony resulting from the characters' knowing things the audience does not.

At the heart of all irony lies a discrepancy, some surprisingly consequent change of meaning or reversal of expectation, an apposite contrast of appearance and reality. One of its specialized forms, dramatic irony, has frequently been described as a disparity between the real situation in a play and the way that situation appears, a significant incongruity that is understood by the audience but not, in time, by the characters of the play. This has been a useful way to define situational or dramatic irony because the description does coincide with...