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in such a way as to place the heroine, representing true feeling and the promise of life, firmly at the opposite pole and in the shadows. For life to triumph, it is the true value of the `feminine' which has to be recognised and lifted up into the light, as was so often symbolised in the New Comedy of the Ancient World when the disregarded and scorned heroine of lowly status was finally discovered to be of high birth and therefore of great value after all. And ultimately this can only happen when the overshadowing dark figure - such as an unrelenting father - is either liberated from his egocentric prison by discovering a new centre of awareness and feeling within himself; or is exposed in his true colours and pushed off the stage.

In the type of Comedy where the hero himself is the chief dark figure, the same rules apply. Right back to Menander, we see the hero who has wronged the heroine and become divided from her by some misjudgement. Through an egocentric limitation on his awareness, he has failed in some way to recognise the truth of the situation. He reacts in a hard, unfeeling manner, rejecting the `feminine' - often in the name of `masculine' propriety and upholding the moral order. And eventually he gets caught out. Either, like Leontes in The Winter's Tale, he discovers that he has wronged the heroine by assuming that she has committed a crime when in fact she was innocent. Or, like Angelo in Measure for Measure, he is also exposed as a self-righteous hypocrite for having committed the same crime of which he has accused someone else.

Ultimately he can only be extricated from the trap he has made for himself by discovering that deeper centre of his personality which both brings him back in touch with true feeling and widens his perception so that he can see the world straight and whole again. And here we again see how the `feminine value' which must be brought into play to redeem the situation represents both these things, inextricably intertwined; both true feeling for others and the wider awareness which permits true understanding, an appreciation of the totality of the situation and how everything is properly connected; whereas the `dark masculine' represents precisely the opposite, a lack of true feeling and an inability to see things whole.

When we look at the handful of comedies which show the heroine herself as the chief dark figure, we see how the very reason she has become dark is that she is not in touch with the true feminine within herself, as we see in Katherina, the ill-tempered, aggressive virago in The Taming of the Shrew, or the bossy, interfering Emma Woodhouse, or the rich, spoiled Tracy Lord in High Society. Each has become imprisoned in a variation on essentially the same hard, egocentric state. They are neither alive to true feeling nor properly aware of the true situation around them (let alone how they look to everyone else). They are each in a state of self-deception. They need to be tamed, teased or thawed out into the soft, warm, alive state of femininity which is their true deeper self, buried under their tough, brittle exterior. Only at this point, when they become truly feminine, seeing the world straight (as with the heroine of Crocodile Dundee) can each recognise at last who is her true `other half'.

Of course there are also those comedies, such as Guys and Dolls or Four Weddings and a Funeral, where there is no obviously dominant dark figure at all. In A Midsummer Night's Dream the darkness which engulfs all the characters is simply that of total confusion, based on the fact that no one can see things straight, although even here it is only the men who get confused. The two heroines remain models of firm, unswerving love. The true feminine is always a beacon of constancy.I

The feminine value

What we thus see emerging is a fundamental polarity which is crucial to the structure of storytelling. At one pole is the power of darkness, centred on the ego, limited consciousness and an inability to see whole, making for confusion, division and ultimately death. At the other is the