Titus Andronicus: Irony 3 key examples

After Titus captures and gags Chiron and Demetrius near the end of Act 5, Scene 2, he begins to formulate his plan to kill his daughter’s rapists and feed them to their mother. This moment is full of verbal irony:

You know your mother means to feast with me,

And calls herself Revenge, and thinks me mad.

Hark, villains, I will grind your bones to dust,

And with your blood and it I’ll make a paste,

And of the paste a coffin I will rear,

And make two pasties of your shameful heads,

And bid that strumpet, your unhallowed dam,

Like to the earth swallow her own increase. 

This is the feast that I have bid her to,

And this the banquet she shall surfeit on; 

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In Act 5, Scene 2, Tamora disguises herself before approaching Titus in a scene full of situational and dramatic irony.  The audience is aware of her disguise plot, as she announces her intentions on stage prior to knocking on Titus’s door. Although Titus suspects Tamora’s identity, he only questions her outright once and seems to take her subsequent explanation (that she is "Revenge") at face value—at least on the surface.  When Titus plays along with Tamora’s ruse by suggesting that her two sons must be personifications of Rape and Murder, Tamora’s response introduces situational irony to the scene:

Tamora: These are my ministers and come with me.

Titus: Are they thy ministers? What are they called? 

Tamora: Rape and Murder; therefore callèd so

’Cause they take vengeance of such kind of men.

Titus: Good Lord, how like the Empress’ sons they are, 

And you the Empress! But we worldly men

Have miserable, mad, mistaking eyes.

O sweet Revenge, now do I come to thee,

And if one arm’s embracement will content thee,

I will embrace thee in it by and by. 

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In Act 5, Scene 3 Titus feeds Tamora her own sons, baked into a pastry, as revenge for their rape of his daughter, whom he himself murdered moments before in order to mitigate her dishonor. This is a gruesome act of dramatic irony, as in the previous scene Titus states exactly what his plans are regarding the baking of her two sons:

Titus: Will ’t please you eat?—Will ’t please your Highness feed? 

Tamora: Why hast thou slain thine only daughter thus? 

Titus: Not I; ’twas Chiron and Demetrius.

They ravished her and cut away her tongue, 

And they, ’twas they, that did her all this wrong.

Saturninus: Go fetch them hither to us presently. 

Titus: Why, there they are, both bakèd in this pie, 

Whereof their mother daintily hath fed,

Eating the flesh that she herself hath bred.

’Tis true, ’tis true! Witness my knife’s sharp point.

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