The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [528]
2. Another well-known version of the Rebirth story centred round the figure of a redeeming heroine is The Sound of Music, by Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein, made into a successful film (1964). Maria, a beautiful young nun, leaves her convent to become governess to the seven children of Captain von Trapp, an autocratic Austrian aristocrat who has been left a widower. He is a cold disciplinarian who rules his children's lives with a rod of iron. As the lively new governess teaches them how to sing, play games and laugh, their father is initially furious to see them being liberated from the frozen prison he has built round them. But so infectious is their newfound delight in life that he himself eventually thaws out. As he joins in their songs and games, he and Maria fall in love and are married. When the Nazis take over the country in 1938, he falls under suspicion for his refusal to serve the tyrannical new regime. In the nick of time they make a 'thrilling escape' from Austria across the mountains, and the story ends with the family running over Alpine meadows to freedom, joyfully singing `the hills are alive with the sound of music' to celebrate their liberation.
1. This only applies to the sort of Quest where the companions are seen as `undifferentiated appendages' of the hero, and therefore expendable, as in the Odyssey or the Jewish Exodus. It does not apply in those, such as Watership Down or King Solomon's Mines, where the companions between them provide a balance of strengths, all of which are necessary for the Quest to succeed.
2. I make no apology for the fact that we repeatedly return to Macbeth as an example because, of all Shakespeare's plays, it provides the most perfect expression of the five-stage cycle of Tragedy. The fact that it is such a pure distillation of the archetypal pattern may help explain why it has aroused such superstitition in actors that they are meant never to refer to it by name but only as `the Scottish play'.
1. Again `three' plays a central part in all the folk tales we looked at in the chapter on `Rebirth: Sleeping Beauty and Snow White, for instance, both unfold in three stages: the first when the heroine initially falls under the shadow of the dark power as a young child; the second when she arrives at the threshold of adult life and the dark power succeeds in imprisoning her in the state of living death; the third when, years later, she is finally redeemed and brought back to life by the Prince.
2. In the first published edition of the Cinderella story, included in Charles Perrault's collection of French folk-tales, Histoires ou Contes du Temps Pass@ (1697), he describes her as only going to the ball twice. This may have been because Perrault heard an already corrupted version; or that, in adapting the story for a French court audience, he shortened it because he did not understand the significance of the Rule of Three. But in almost all other folk-versions of the story (e.g., Aschenputtel, in the collection of German folk-tales by the Grimm brothers), the heroine sees the Prince-hero three times in her disguise, before the final fourth encounter which reveals her true identity.
3. Although the chief archetypal numbers around which stories are structured are one, two, three and four, other numbers which appear less often are those which combine and reinforce their significance, particularly compounds