At this point we must turn from themes and narrative technique to the various categories of irony we encounter in the romance. We shall concentrate on five categories in the five chapters that follow, proceeding from the most small-scale type of irony to those with much wider implications. But to start with a category which I call verbal irony demands a word of explanation since all literary irony may be said to be verbal, whether it operates with the contrast between the real and apparent meanings of a statement or with the discrepancy between an utterance and its context, whilst the irony of situation presupposes an artist who exploits it verbally. Even the use of gesture or intonation as a pointer to irony in the context of a public recital is still a signal to a verbal expression of irony. Instead, I use the term verbal irony in the more restricted sense of irony conveyed by the choice of one particular word (a restriction which comes close to the rhetorical definition of the figure antiphrasis as unius verbi ironia) and propose to consider small-scale cases of irony under such headings as verbal ambiguity, oxymoron, litotes, inversion and divergence.