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present the drama from that other perspective which shows the hero or heroine having to contend with the same dark forces within themselves. In Peer Gynt, for instance - another story shaped by elements of all the seven basic plots - we saw how the dark figures the hero encounters at the beginning, the Dark King of the Trolls and the Temptress Woman in Green, are personifications of the dark powers which then come to possess the hero himself through almost the whole of the story. His real problem is to find that wider vision which will liberate him from his own monstrous and blind egotism, from the double grip of the `dark masculine' and the `dark feminine' which is separating him from the Self; until he is finally brought to that deeper state of consciousness, and the story can end on the image of Peer united with his anima Solveig, `light masculine' and `light feminine' in perfect balance.

In fact all archetypal stories - whether the darkness is shown as outside the central figure or within - are really preoccupied with the hero or heroine's inner state. By the principle of the `unrealised value, their battles with the external world are merely reflections of what is going on inside them, and we never see them satisfactorily overcoming the darkness outside them until they have eliminated the darkness within.

A story explicitly concerned to make precisely this point is that great seventeenthcentury Spanish novel Don Quixote. The whole purpose of Cervantes's tale is to show the foolishness of a man who projects onto the outside world the struggle which should be fought inside him. Don Quixote is a man in middle life who for years has been obsessed with chivalric romances, stories of knights engaged in derring-do to save damsels in distress (the equivalent of the James Bond stories of our own time), without understanding their inner meaning. Full of blind and silly egotism, he decides to become a knight himself. He dedicates himself to the `service' of a local girl, La Dulcinea Tobosa, as an external projection of his anima, takes up a rusty lance, as a projection of his masculinity, and rides out into the world to challenge all the powers of evil that he can find. But of course these manifestations of the dark power are purely illusory, projections of his own fantasies, as when he attacks the windmills imagining them to be hostile giants.

It is only after he has wandered through the world for a long time as an absurdly self-deceiving idiot (as is only too apparent to almost everyone he meets) that he finally recognises the central truth which has been eluding him all along: that all the blindness and egotism which he has been projecting onto the `enemies' outside him are in fact his own problem. In the closing pages of the book, he flings away the silly romances which have snared him into such a false perspective and repents of his idiocy. He has at last won true self-knowledge, he has come to `see whole'. And at this point, transformed from the foolish Don Quixote into `Don Alonso the Good, he dies in old age, at peace with himself and all the world.

The Tempest

At the end of The Lord of the Rings Frodo disappears into the sunset, still led by the Wise Old Man he could never become himself. Don Quixote at least attains to the beginning of wisdom just before his death. One of the few stories in the world which concentrate on the process of a hero actually being transformed into a Wise Old Man, representing the most complete state of maturity and inner development a man can reach, is the last complete play written by Shakespeare.

In The Tempest we are again confronted by the image of a kingdom where something has gone horribly amiss, where the true ruler is absent and where power has been usurped by his weak, tyrannical brother: even though, in the play itself, we do not actually see this `upper world' in disarray at all. In this, the most inward of all Shakespeare's plays, we follow events entirely in the shadowy `inferior' (or interior) realm, where, after many years, we see the forces of light at last constellating