Blood Wedding Journal #2

A dramatist often creates a gap between what the audience knows and what the characters know. With reference to at least two plays, discuss how and to what effect dramatists have used this technique.

Dramatists, especially Sophocles and Lorca, use dramatic irony to create a gap between what the audience knows and what the characters know. The audience usually knows the entire story, with secrets and all, while the individual characters only know certain parts of the story. This happens in both Oedipus and Blood Wedding. With Oedipus being a fairly popular tragedy, many know the story already while seeing the play. This creates dramatic irony because the audience knows the outcome and the truth while Oedipus is still on the journey to find the truth. This is this gap created between the two groups of people. In Blood Wedding some characters know part of the truth, and others do not. Obvious the bride knows the truth, that her and Leonardo still want each other, and have seen each other in the past. On the other hand, the Bridegroom does not know this. During the play however, the audience knows everything with seeing all of the scenes. It creates dramatic irony and that gap again with the audience knowing something that the characters do not know.