| Tracing back to the history of English literature, the drama of Shakespeare isregarded as the classical opus in the whole world. Shakespeare’s drama plays anessential role in the English literature. And Hamlet is one of his well—known tragediesand also the most celebrated art. Viewing Shakespeare’s popular works, the techniqueof irony is distinct used, the language of the works are vividly drawn by his hand.Therefore, the critics of the classical times pay more attention on it, in nowadays thecritics and readers are all focused on their eyesight in his works.More than2000years development, the technique of irony is gradually developedmore scopes and connotations of the technical terms. In18thcentury, the irony wasdeveloped swiftly in European; it was widely used in the literature by the writers. In theworks of Shakespeare, there are many techniques of irony using which is abundant forthe works and the language, attracting more readers and scholars.With the development of the pragmatics, more pragmatic theory is implicated inthe criticism of literature, which leads the combination of the literature and thelinguistics. The paper, based on the structure of Austin and Searle’s Speech Act Theory,elaborates the relations between the irony and the speech act theory and analyze theirony utterance in Shakespeare’s outstanding Hamlet, which is good for our readersunderstanding and spiritual communication. The paper extracts some certain ironyexamples from the Hamlet, from the micro and macro speech act illustrating the cases,benefiting the readers to catch the connotation of the play. At the same time, no matterwhat different kinds of literatures, the novel, poem, play, the technique of irony can beused to analyze the works. In practice, the irony also can be used for critics utilizing.Due to the limitation of the time and lacking relevant language database, the paperonly analyzes the irony utterance of the character of the plot in terms of the speech act.If the paper carries on debating in the deep angles, it will lead the technique being morepowerful and researching. |
