What are examples of situational irony in Act 2 of King Lear?

The term “situational irony” is often used to describe a situation that does not turn out as expected and indeed even turns out in a way that is the opposite of what was expected. A person, for instance, might plot to kill someone else but in the process kill himself. A famous example of situational irony occurs at the end of Kate Chopin’s short tale “The Story of an Hour.” In that work, a wife believes that her husband has died in an accident, and so she looks forward to living a long life filled with personal freedom; at the end of the story, the husband comes home unexpectedly and, when the wife sees him, she instantly dies from shock.

Situational irony plays a significant role in the second act of William Shakespeare’s play King Lear.  In the first act of the play, when Lear was dividing his kingdom between his two “loyal” daughters, Goneril and Regan, he had imagined the kind of comfortable and honored life he would lead in the future. Addressing his daughters, he had said,

Ourself, by monthly course, 
With reservation of an hundred knights, 
By you to be sustain'd, shall our abode 
Make with you by due turns.

By the end of Act 2, however, these grand plans have completely collapsed as Goneril and Regan try to strip him of almost his entire retinue:

Regan. I pray you, father, being weak, seem so. 
If, till the expiration of your month, 
You will return and sojourn with my sister, 
Dismissing half your train, come then to me. 
I am now from home, and out of that provision 
Which shall be needful for your entertainment.

. . . . . . . . . . . .

Goneril. Hear, me, my lord.
What need you five-and-twenty, ten, or five, 
To follow in a house where twice so many 
Have a command to tend you?

Regan. What need one?

Lear. O, reason not the need! Our basest beggars 
Are in the poorest thing superfluous.

By this point in the play, the situational irony of Lear’s predicament is clear. The pleasant old age he had imagined for himself when he gave up his kingship has now been revealed as a sham. He had hoped to retain both the respect of his daughters and effective power over them, and he had assumed that he would be able to retain both of these things. By the end of Act 2, however, he clearly has lost both. The irony of his situation is obvious.

What are examples of cosmic irony in King Lear?

Cosmic irony when attached to this play is a term that refers to the way that the gods or the higher powers seem at best indifferent and at worst profoundly antagonistic to what goes on in the world of humans. This is shown so many ways through the almost absurdist presentation of Lear wandering around aimlessly on the heath in the middle of a storm to the most poignant example of all, which comes in Act V scene 3 when the messenger fails to reach Edmund's Captain before he carries out his orders and hangs Cordelia. That Cordelia is hanged even after the eventual victory of the forces sympathetic to Lear is a prime example of cosmic irony, as the bleak and tragic death of Cordelia, the one truly faultless character in the entire play, paints a very bleak picture of life in this chaotic universe where justice seems to be a matter of random chance rather than a fitting reward for good behaviour. This cosmic irony is picked up upon by Kent in Act IV scene 1 when he comments on the way that he has been treated for his loyalty to Lear:

As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods;
They kill us for their sport.

The comparison of the gods to boys who kill flies for sport is apt, as he has just had his eyes taken out. Yet this quote is so important precisely because it could be seen as a motto for this play, in which Shakespeare presents the audience with a world where good is not rewarded with justice and evil is only defeated as a matter of seeming chance at the end. Humans are indeed presented as the playthings of the gods, and any notion of justice is at best fragile.