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victims he kills, Duncan, Banquo, Macduff's wife and children, there is another who escapes - Malcolm, Fleance, Macduff himself - and who flees the kingdom into England. Here, in the `inferior realm, beyond Macbeth's limited field of awareness, the light forces concentrate their own power, until they are ready to invade the `upper realm' and to close in on the monster for the climactic confrontation. When the reversal has taken place and the usurping tyrant has been overthrown, what we see is a kingdom restored to itself, under its rightful king. Indeed the play ends on a note of solemn rejoicing as they all head off to Scone for Malcolm's coronation. Just as in other types of story, as the kingdom is restored to wholeness, the great prize has been wrested from the grip of darkness. What essentially we are looking at, albeit from an unusual angle, is a version of the familiar happy ending.

Rebirth

It is appropriate that the story of Rebirth should conclude this sequence because, in its simpler forms, it links back so clearly to the types of plot which began it, where the dark power is presented as something wholly outside the central figure. In the fairy tale versions of Rebirth we come across in childhood the chief source of darkness in the story is personified in some mysterious older figure with magical powers, such as the malign witches who in Snow White or Sleeping Beauty place the heroine under an imprisoning spell. Later we come to those versions, like Crime and Punishment or Silas Marner, where the darkness is presented as centred within the hero or heroine's own personality. And here, since they themselves have become dark, in order to be liberated they have to go through precisely that same psychic shift we see in Voyage and Return stories or Comedy (and even begin to see in some tragedies, like King Lear): the move from the restricted awareness centred on the ego to that deeper centre in the human personality which opens out their understanding and unites them with all the world.

Finally in the two Scandinavian versions, The Snow Queen and Peer Gynt, we see both versions of the Rebirth story brought together. In each case the hero is placed under an imprisoning spell by the combination of two dark, older figures outside him, a wicked magician and a powerful witch. But in each case this has the effect of bringing out the dark side of the hero's own personality, which is what gradually draws him into nightmarish isolation. At last in each case he is released from his prison by a shining personification of the `eternal feminine', a woman both strong and loving, who is all light. This is what finally inspires the shift from the limited centre of his personality in which he has spent most of the story, to that deeper centre which he consciously recognises to be his `true self'. Thus it is that each hero can be shown ending his story in the warmth and light of a glorious summer's day, joyously alive because he is united with the `other half' who has at last both set him free and made him whole.

The underlying shape of stories: Summing up

We thus see that behind each of these seven central ways in which stories naturally form in the human imagination lies the same fundamental impulse.

Each begins by showing us a hero or heroine in some way incomplete, who then encounters the dark power. Through most of the story the dark power remains dominant, casting a shadow in which all remains unresolved. But the essence of the action is that it shows us the light and dark forces in the story gradually constellating to produce a final decisive confrontation. As a result, in any story which reaches complete resolution (and of course, for reasons we shall explore later, there are many which do not), the ending shows us how the dark power can be overthrown, with the light ending triumphant. The only question is whether the central figure is identified with the light, in which case he or she ends up liberated and whole; or whether they have fallen irrevocably into the grip of darkness, in which case they are destroyed. But, whatever