Occasion In Literature Meaning

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Occasion definition is - a favorable opportunity or circumstance. How to use occasion in a sentence. The definition of a festival dance would be an occasion for feasting or celebrating with dance. Definition of poetry in English literature? Poetry is literature in metrical form.

Articulating a simple irony definition can be daunting. It’s a large concept, but irony can be broken down into three central categories. We’ll define each of these three main types of irony, and provide examples from plays, short stories, essays and poems.

IRONY

Definition: There are three types of irony: verbal, situational and dramatic.

Verbal irony occurs when a speaker’s intention is the opposite of what he or she is saying. For example, a character stepping out into a hurricane and saying, “What nice weather we’re having!”

Situational irony occurs when the actual result of a situation is totally different from what you’d expect the result to be. Sitcoms often use situational irony. For example, a family spends a lot of time and money planning an elaborate surprise birthday party for their mother to show her how much they care. But it turns out, her birthday is next month, and none of them knew the correct date. She ends up fuming that no one cares enough to remember her birthday.

Dramatic irony occurs when the audience knows a key piece of information that a character in a play, movie or novel does not. This is the type of irony that makes us yell, “DON’T GO IN THERE!!” during a scary movie. Dramatic irony is huge in Shakespeare’s tragedies, most famously in Othello and Romeo and Juliet, both of which we’ll examine later.

Why Writers Use It: Irony inverts our expectations. It can create the unexpected twist at the end of a joke or a story that gets us laughing — or crying. Verbal irony tends to be funny; situational irony can be funny or tragic; and dramatic irony is often tragic.

Irony in Shakespeare and Literature

Dramatic Irony in Othello

Othello is one of the most heartrending tragedies ever written, and Shakespeare’s use of dramatic irony is one of the reasons the play is so powerful to read and watch.

We know that the handkerchief used as proof of Desdemona’s infidelity was, in fact, stolen by Emilia at Iago’s behest. Desdemona was framed by Iago, and we know she is innocent. But we are powerless to stop Othello; he has resolved to murder his wife.

Iago, whom Othello considers a friend, has been plotting Othello’s demise for the duration of the play. Othello does not know that Iago is the one pulling the strings, but we do. We know he is the one who convinces Roderigo to kill Cassio, even as we watch him pretend to help Cassio after he is wounded. Only we see Iago kill Roderigo before he can reveal the truth. In this way, we are complicit with Iago’s misdeeds. We are the only witnesses, and yet we can do nothing.

Dramatic Irony in Romeo and Juliet

In the final act of this archetypal love story, Shakespeare employs dramatic irony to keep the audience on the edge of their seats.

Verbal Irony in A Modest Proposal

Johnathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal is a classic example of verbal irony. He begins seemingly in earnest, discussing the sad state of destitute children:

[…] whoever could find out a fair, cheap, and easy method of making these children sound, useful members of the commonwealth, would deserve so well of the public as to have his statue set up for a preserver of the nation.

Seems reasonable enough. But things take a very ironic turn:

I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout.

Is Swift sincerely proposing that we eat children? No, but he has indeed inverted our expectations and written a wonderfully ironic essay.

Situational irony in The Gift of the Magi

In this short story by O. Henry, a wife sells her hair to buy her husband a watch chain, and her husband sells his watch to buy her combs for her hair. Both have made sacrifices in order to buy gifts for one another, but in the end, the gifts are useless. The real gift is how much they are willing to give up to show their love for one another.

Situational irony in “Messy Room” by Shel Silverstein

Whosever room this is should be ashamed!
His underwear is hanging on the lamp.
His raincoat is there in the overstuffed chair,
And the chair is becoming quite mucky and damp.
His workbook is wedged in the window,
His sweater’s been thrown on the floor.
His scarf and one ski are beneath the TV,
And his pants have been carelessly hung on the door.
His books are all jammed in the closet,
His vest has been left in the hall.
A lizard named Ed is asleep in his bed,
And his smelly old sock has been stuck to the wall.
Whosever room this is should be ashamed!
Donald or Robert or Willie or–
Huh? You say it’s mine? Oh, dear,
I knew it looked familiar!

The speaker criticizes the room’s owner at length, only to discover that the room is his own.

Check Out the Previous Literary Terms in the Series

Alliteration
Allusion
Assonance
Extended Metaphor
Juxtaposition
Metonymy
Oxymoron
Hyperbole
Personification
Simile

Share your best examples of irony in the comments!

‘How all occasions do inform against me’: so begins one of Hamlet’s most reasoned and level-headed soliloquies in Shakespeare’s play. The soliloquy comes relatively late in Hamlet, in Act IV scene 4, after Hamlet has been dispatched to England by Claudius (ostensibly on a diplomatic mission, but in reality Claudius has arranged for Hamlet to be killed en route). We have a full plot summary of Hamlethere.

The best way to offer an analysis of this soliloquy is perhaps to go through the ‘How all occasions do inform against me’ speech line by line and offer a summary of what Hamlet is saying. As we go, we’ll draw attention to some of the most meaningful and salient aspects of the soliloquy.

How all occasions do inform against me,
And spur my dull revenge! What is a man,
If his chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more.

Hamlet begins his soliloquy by lamenting the fact that everything seems to be accusing him (‘inform against me’) for not taking revenge on his uncle, Claudius, for having murdered Hamlet’s own father. Everything is spurring him on or encouraging him to take revenge. Hamlet rhetorically asks what the point of man’s existence is if he just eats and sleeps like an animal.

Occasion Definition English

Sure, he that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and god-like reason
To fust in us unused.

After all, Hamlet reasons, God – who created man and gave him the power to think about both the past and future – did not imbue man with such thinking power for it to rot away unused in us.

Now, whether it be
Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple
Of thinking too precisely on the event,
A thought which, quarter’d, hath but one part wisdom
And ever three parts coward, I do not know
Why yet I live to say ‘This thing’s to do;’
Sith I have cause and will and strength and means
To do’t.

Hamlet now wonders whether he hesitates out of animal-like simplicity and mindlessness, or whether it’s from his own (human) cowardliness and over-thinking. (If it’s the latter, then only one-quarter of his hesitation is due to sensible consideration of the consequences; the other three-quarters is down to being too scared to go through with the revenge.) Either way, Hamlet says he doesn’t know why he’s still alive and is able to talk about taking revenge (without actually getting on with it). After all, he has everything he needs – the justification, the desire, the strength, and the resources – to go and enact his vengeance. (‘Sith’, before they became the antagonists in the Star Wars films, was an early modern form of ‘Since’.)

Examples gross as earth exhort me:
Witness this army of such mass and charge
Led by a delicate and tender prince,
Whose spirit with divine ambition puff’d
Makes mouths at the invisible event,
Exposing what is mortal and unsure
To all that fortune, death and danger dare,
Even for an egg-shell.

Hamlet says that Fortinbras, the ‘delicate and tender prince’ of Norway, who is rallying an army so he can invade neighbouring lands (including Denmark), is a glowing example of how someone in Hamlet’s position should act. (‘Examples gross as earth’ means, roughly, examples as solid and concrete as the ground beneath Hamlet’s feet. In other words, Hamlet doesn’t feel spurred on by any abstract notion of ‘honour’ or ‘revenge’: he can actually see how a prince should behave, by observing Fortinbras.) Fortinbras’ spirit or character is puffed up with God-given ambition, and the Norwegian prince seems to scoff or ‘make mouths at’ the mere idea of defeat or failure (‘the invisible event’). Fortinbras exposes everything that is mortal to anything that can threaten it (there may be faint pun on Fortinbras intended in the word ‘fortune’), even something that is worthless (an ‘eggshell’ was proverbially something of no value in Shakespeare’s time).

Rightly to be great
Is not to stir without great argument,
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw
When honour’s at the stake.

The truly great man will not stir to action (especially military action) without a good ‘argument’ or motive in favour of doing so. But if his honour’s been challenged, he will instantly get his armour on and go out and defend it. At least, this is one interpretation of Hamlet’s meaning here. As Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor point out in their notes in the Arden edition, AMAZON, some critics have chosen to analyse its meaning differently, i.e. ‘true greatness consists not in refraining from action when there’s no good reason to act, but in looking hard enough to find a justifiable cause in the smallest detail, when your honour is being questioned’. In other words, it’s better to pick a fight over nothing when your honour’s been challenged, than to sit back and do nothing. It’s difficult to say which meaning is intended here, although it’s clear that Hamlet admires Fortinbras for being a man of action and courage.

How stand I then,
That have a father kill’d, a mother stain’d,
Excitements of my reason and my blood,
And let all sleep?

‘How can I stand here and let everyone who has wronged me sleep sound in their beds,’ Hamlet asks himself, ‘when my father has been killed, and my mother has been dishonoured?’ However, ‘all sleep’ here is ambiguous: by ‘all’ Hamlet could mean ‘everyone involved’ or ‘everything’, i.e. ‘how can I let everything rest’, or ‘how can I forget about everything’.

while, to my shame, I see
The imminent death of twenty thousand men,
That, for a fantasy and trick of fame,
Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot
Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause,
Which is not tomb enough and continent
To hide the slain? O, from this time forth,
My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!

To his shame, while Hamlet’s standing there doing nothing, Fortinbras’ army of twenty thousand men are courageously preparing to fight and die on a small plot of land which isn’t big enough for the participants to decide the matter on, and which isn’t big enough to bury all of those soldiers who will die there. From now on, Hamlet rousingly concludes with a rhyming couplet (‘forth’ and ‘worth’ may well have been full rhymes in Shakespeare’s time), his thoughts will be bloody and courageous, or they’re worthless!

Occasion In Literature Meaning Examples

‘How all occasions do inform against me’ shows Hamlet at his most clear-headed and reasonable, and yet there are some internal contradictions in this soliloquy. For one, as Thompson and Taylor point out in their notes in the Arden edition, it’s odd to hear Hamlet speaking of having the ‘strength and means’ to carry out his revenge while he’s aboard a ship for England.

It’s also not clear why Hamlet describes Fortinbras, the mighty Norwegian prince who commands an army, as ‘delicate and tender’. This is a man who, as Hamlet goes on to say, is leading twenty thousand men to their almost certain deaths, as part of his military campaign to conquer other lands. (There’s history between Denmark and Norway; indeed, Fortinbras’ father, Old Fortinbras, was killed by Hamlet’s father, Old Hamlet, in events that took place before the start of the play’s action, but which are described by Horatio in the opening scene of the play.) As elsewhere in the play, Hamlet’s words are not without their internal contradictions.

Occasion In Literature Meaning In The Bible

‘How all occasions do inform against me’ has a clear meaning and message, then: Hamlet looks at Fortinbras’ resolve and decides to rouse himself to action, and to carry out his revenge upon Claudius. But there’s something troubling, even ironic, at this epiphany occurring while Hamlet is miles away from the object of his revenge, his uncle, Claudius, and in his taking inspiration from Fortinbras, whose mission – as Hamlet himself acknowledges – seems ultimately fruitless and doomed to failure.