The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [113]
In fact we can set out the general stages through which the pattern unfolds like this:
1. Anticipation Stage: the hero is in someway incomplete or unfulfilled and his thoughts are turned towards the future in hope of some unusual gratification. Some object of desire or course of action presents itself, and his energies have found a focus.
2. Dream Stage: he becomes in some way committed to his course of action (e.g., Faust signing his pact with the devil, Humbert causing the death of Lolita's mother which enables him to enter on his affair) and for a while things go almost improbably well for the hero. He is winning the gratification he had dreamed of, and seems to be `getting away with it.
3. Frustration Stage: almost imperceptibly things begin to go wrong. The hero cannot find a point of rest. He begins to experience a sense of frustration, and in order to secure his position may feel compelled to further `dark acts' which lock him into his course of action even more irrevocably. A 'shadow figure' may appear at this point, seeming in some obscure way to threaten him.
4. Nightmare Stage: things are now slipping seriously out of the hero's control. He has a mounting sense of threat and despair. Forces of opposition and fate are closing in on him.
5. Destruction or death wish Stage: either by the forces he has aroused against him, or by some final act of violence which precipitates his own death (e.g., murder or suicide), the hero is destroyed.
If we look again at the familiar example of Macbeth, we can see how these five stages correspond exactly to the five acts into which Shakespeare divides the drama:
1. Act One (Anticipation Stage) shows the triumphant generals Macbeth and Banquo returning from winning a great victory. They meet the three `dark sisters, who prophesy to Macbeth that he will hold three great titles, Glamis, Cawdor and King. This fires his ambition and when he hears that a grateful King Duncan has already rewarded him with the first two titles, he writes to his wife to tell her about the witches' prediction that he would one day hold the third as well. She eggs him on to make the prediction complete, and they find their `focus' in the conspiracy to murder Duncan.
2. Act Two (Dream Stage) shows Macbeth comitting the `dark deed' and subsequently killing the two grooms to cover up his crime. Initially things could not go better for the hero. Duncan's two sons flee to England, arousing suspicion that they had somehow been implicated in the crime, and Macbeth is chosen to be king.
3. Act Three (Frustration Stage) opens with Banquo soliloquising `Thou hast it all now: King, Cawdor, Glamis, all, as the weird women promis'd; and, I fear, thou play'dst most foully for it. The first inklings of suspicion are arising. Macbeth in turn is distrustful of Banquo because of the witches' prediction that it would be his descendants, not Macbeth's, who would sit on the throne of Scotland. He arranges for Banquo's murder. Macbeth expresses his growing frustration in such phrases as `we have scotch'd the snake, not killed it, and this is heightened when the murderers report that they have killed Banquo, but that his son Fleance escaped. At dinner that night Macbeth is confronted with Banquo's accusing ghost, and the act ends with the news that Macbeth's last supporter among the great Scottish lords, Macduff, has fled to England to join Duncan's sons.
4. Act Four (Nightmare Stage) opens with Macbeth's second, much more fearful visit to the witches, who give him three increasingly enigmatic warnings: that he should `beware Macduff'; that he will only be overthrown by `man not of woman born'; and that this can only happen when Birnam wood has come to Dunsinane. Now in a state of mounting terror, Macbeth lashes out at