- Cinderella - Unrecognised virtue at last recognised. It's the same story as the Tortoise and the Hare. Cinderella doesn't have to be a girl, nor does it even have to be a love story. What is essential is that the good is despised, but is recognised in the end, something that we all want to believe.
- Achilles - The Fatal Flaw, that is the groundwork for practically all classical tragedy, although it can be made comedy too, as in the old standard Aldwych farce. Lennox Robinson's The Whiteheaded Boy is the Fatal Flaw In reverse.
- Faust- The Debt that Must be Paid, the fate that catches up with all of us sooner or later. This is found in all its purity as the chase in O'Neill's The Emperor Jones. And in a completely different mood, what else is the Cherry Orchard?
- Tristan - that standard triangular plot of two women and one man, or two men and one woman. The Constant Nymph, or almost any French farce.
- Circe - The Spider and the Fly. Othello. The Barretts of Wimpole Street, if you want to change the sex. And if you don't believe me about Othello (the real plot of which is not the triangle and only incidentally jealousy) try casting it with a good Desdemona but a poor Iago.
- Romeo and Juliet - Boy meets Girl, Boy loses Girl, Boy either finds or does not find Girl: it doesn't matter which.
- Orpheus - The Gift taken Away. This may take two forms: either the tragedy of the loss itself, as in Juno and the Paycock, or it may be about the search that follows the loss, as in Jason and the Golden Fleece.
- The Hero Who Cannot Be Kept Down. The best example of this is that splendid play Harvey, made into a film with James Stewart.
more on semiotics
Oh dude, don't do it, this stuff will lead you astray.
ReplyDeletePeople tell stories about their lives, their world, and how they see themselves.
Sure there's going to be some convergence due to people with similar problems finding similar solutions, but in order to divide them into these categories you have to cut away all the meat.
Number 2 on this list is a perfect example: The whole "achilles heel" thing doesn't appear until the 1st century AD, and dosen't enter the cultural vernacular until the 19th. He isn't even a 'classical' character; the heros of the epic cycle, represent how the parochial and illiterate dark-age greeks remembered the lost glory days of the Mycenean period.
Achilles' story in this context, was primarily about 'kleos':
* what it was ( undying fame )
* what it was good for ( it's the only immortality a man can hope for )
* how you got it ( you took it at someone else's expense )
The mechanics of how he died was never as important as the fact that when given the
choice by his mother Thetis, he *chose* to die young in battle and thus live forever, rather than having a long, satisfying life and being forgotten.
The notion crops up in the stories about other heros of the period. For instance, Hercules' framing story is about the pursuit of kleos to extirpate a terrible, terrible crime, in this case, beating his wife and children to death in a 'roid rage ( goddess induced though it was, that didn't exonerate him to the ancients, something else about their culture you miss when hunting for archetypes ).
When you move out of the dark-age into the archaic and classical periods, the re-emergence of literacy, trade, the rise of the hoplite class and polis it made possible, leads to a profound shift in the way the greeks saw themselves.
So while they retained the old stories the way they told them and what they considered important and noble was very different.
Notions of kleos become much more collective, invested in the polis or family. When Euripides' Medea kills her and Jason's children she's cutting off his immortality.
Similarly a classical Athenian ( I'm thinking of someone in particular whose name escapes me, possibly Thucydides ) might deride Hercules as a coward and a barbarian, comparing him unfavourably to a nameless farmer who keeps his place in the phalanx.
Fast forward six hundred years to the 1st century AD, and yeah maybe the achilles story is now about his fatal flaw, frankly I don't know, I'm not really familiar with the achilleid, something about him being raised by satyrs or centaurs or soemthing and having the nature of both beast and man. It doesn't really matter the point is, he's a vehicle for conveying the concerns of someone living under the roman principate.
Or fast forward again to the modern period where he's become a vehicle for showcasing Brad Pitt's muscular buttocks... or something. Oh and don't even get me started on fucking Hercules, he's gone from child murderer to icon of disney family values.
All of which is a round about way of saying that these archetypes are always bullcrap, no matter how you frame them. Even when you think your dealing with the *same story*, you're really not, let alone when you think you've detected a universal theme in the myths of cultures profoundly alien to one another.
None of which is to say that people don't create new stories by borrrowing from old ones.
Obviously they do, and I reckon if you had the inclination you could probably construct some pretty interesting taxonomic trees, at least for better attested stuff like shakespeare, but even then they'd be pretty tangled up with all the horizontal exchanges, and hybridization.