Francesca's Monologues and Infernal Irony

Francesca's monologues in Dante's Inferno are filled with infernal irony. The sinners in Hell, including Francesca, offer misleading and manipulative confessions due to their knowledge that Dante will eventually report their stories to the world. Francesca's confession, permeated by infernal irony, reveals a discrepancy between what she says and what she means. The presence of an interlocutor, Dante, gives the sinners an incentive to be deceitful. Unlike Shakespeare's soliloquies that expose true intentions, the monologues in Inferno contain opaque confessions that demand a hermeneutics of suspicion.