While our modern culture is replete with stories incorporating every imaginable setting, plot and character, the history of storytelling has been characterized by the retelling of a few basic stories, involving a selection of core character types. This has proved a durable way of exploring the human condition, with archetypes providing a shorthand for audiences to engage with universal themes, among them, love, death, tragedy, war, faith and death. The psychologist Carl Jung claimed that archetypes were the product of our ‘collective unconscious’.
As is evident elsewhere in this book, ancient narratives such as creation myths reflected a fairly limited number of basic storylines. Aristotle’s Poetics outlined a small pool of basic plots underpinning Greek mythology, while Greek performers used masks to hasten audience recognition of the archetype each character embodied. Similarly, most societies have developed canons of legends (often myths taken out of the world of the fantastical and recast in a more naturalistic setting) and folktales that deliver a notably consistent set of themes and character types.
The seven basic plots
Among the more celebrated attempts at specifying the extent of archetype in drama is Christopher Booker’s 2004 book, The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories, in which he identified the following recurring narratives: overcoming the monster; rags to riches; the quest; voyage and return; comedy; tragedy; and rebirth. Georges Polti (1867–1946) had earlier enumerated thirty-six basic ‘dramatic situations’. As for identifying character archetypes, among the most famous attempts is Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale (1928), in which he identified seven basic figures: the dispatcher, the false hero, the helper, the hero, the princess and her father, the provider and the villain. Other critics have noted the absence from this list of the earth mother, the everyman, the femme fatale, the innocent, the mentor, the outcast and the scapegoat – to name just a few.
While opinions differ on the specifics, there is nonetheless a general acceptance that archetypes have been a defining feature of our species’ storytelling traditions. As recorded by James Boswell in his The Life of Johnson, Samuel Johnson once observed: ‘how small a quantity of real fictionthere is in the world; and that the same images, with very little variation, have served all the authors who have ever written.’