‘I that am curtail’d of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
Deform’d, unfiinish’d, sent before my time
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up ...
Have no delight to pass away the time
Unless to spy my shadow in the sun,
And descant on mine own deformity.
And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover,
To entertain these fair, well spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain.’
Richard III, i.1
When we hear these words spoken at the beginning of a story by a twisted hunch-back, exulting in his physical and moral deformity, we have little difficulty in recognising him at once as a ‘monster’. Indeed Richard of Gloster, as portrayed by Shakespeare, is one of the most explicitly monstrous figures in all storytelling.
Since we are following the story, as it were, through his eyes, Richard III is a Tragedy. We see him, behind the ‘light’ mask of charm he wears to the world, plotting his way ruthlessly to the throne, over a mounting pile of corpses. In familiar tragic manner we see his mounting ambition and treachery casting an ever-longer shadow of fear and suspicion – until at last positive opposition to him begins to constellate round the figure of Henry Earl of Richmond.
But at this point, when we see Richmond landing in England, determined to seek out and destroy the ‘wretched, bloody and usurping boar’ who ‘lives even now at the centre of this isle’, it is as if we are being given a glimpse of another plot altogether. Henry is just like the brave young hero of an Overcoming the Monster story, setting out to confront and overthrow a towering figure of evil. On the eve of the battle of Bosworth we return to see events through Richard’s eyes, the monster cornered at last, finally into the Nightmare Stage: a ‘divided self’ as he sees the fearful procession of his victims’ ghosts. Stricken by ‘coward conscience’, he recognises how his foul crimes have left him all alone. The next day Richmond confronts Richard and kills him. exulting ‘the day is ours, the bloody dog is slain’. Like many other monster-slayers, Richmond then succeeds to the kingdom and wins the hand of his chosen queen, the ‘true’ Elizabeth.
In other words, we see here how these two plots – Tragedy and Overcoming the Monster – may often be looking at the same basic pattern of events from two quite different points of view. If we were to look at the story of David and Goliath from Goliath’s point of view, it would seem like the end of a Tragedy. Conversely, what we are seeing in a certain kind of Tragedy is the process whereby a human being may be transformed into a ‘monster’. We are being shown how a ‘monster’ comes into being in the first place. The story of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is the story of how a seemingly respectable doctor is transformed, step by step, into a hideous, deformed monster, Hyde. The story of Macbeth shows how a successful soldier, admired by everyone, is gradually transformed into the monster of the later stages of the play, with Macduff cast in the role of monster-slayer – even down to Macduff’s last words to Macbeth, as they exit fighting:
‘We’ll have thee, as our rarer monsters are,
painted upon a pole, and underwrit
Here you may see the tyrant.’
Humbert Humbert, as he discloses his perverse love for little girls and the amoral heartlessness of his behaviour towards Lolita’s mother, gradually reveals himself as the monster who can end up by committing the appalling cold-blooded murder of Quilty. The portrait in The Picture of Dorian Gray pitilessly reflects the gradual corruption of a beautiful young man into a monster ‘hideous, wrinkled and loathsome’ to behold. And if we recall the three chief modes of behaviour which, in an earlier chapter, we saw as typical of the ‘Monster’ in storytelling – the Monster as Predator, as Holdfast and as Avenger – we can see how closely this may correspond to the behaviour of the tragic hero, as he goes through the stages of his rise and fall. When we first meet Macbeth or Humbert Humbert, we see them turning into Predators, determined to get hold of some prize: the kingship, Lolita. We then see them, having won the object of their desire, determined Holdfast-like to hang on to it. Finally we see their possession challenged, when they lash out blindly in the role of Avenger: Macbeth ordering the killing of Macduff’s household, Humbert killing Quilty.
But at this point we must recognise, of course, that by no means all the heroes and heroines of Tragedy are such complete ‘monsters’. It is hard to see Icarus, for instance, as anything more than a foolish boy, who harms no one but himself. Brutus, who killed Caesar not to gratify his own ambition but because he finally accepted that Caesar’s ambition had become a threat to the public good, would hardly have been given by his opponents the epitaph ‘the noblest Roman of them all’ if they had seen him as a monster. Even Antony himself scarcely became a monster, although his actions must have led to the deaths of thousands. He was brought to his destruction as a ‘divided self’ by weakness and by a foolish love, rather than by that excess of ruthlessness inseparable from a true monster.
In fact we can now begin to look at Tragedy from a rather different perspective. So far we have been looking at it essentially in terms of the outlines of the plot. Now we must take into account the gradations which exist within the framework of that plot, according to the extent to which the hero or heroine is primarily the malevolent author of other people’s sufferings, or is just a victim of his or her own folly. In an earlier chapter, and a different context, we distinguished between ‘active’ and ‘passive’ characters. Here we employ much the same distinction, and it is obviously the more ‘active’, aggressive tragic heroes – Macbeth, Richard III, Dorian Gray, Mr Hyde – who most completely correspond to the condition of the ‘monster’.
On the other hand, those who are least monstrous fall into two groups. The first includes those heroes and heroines who, although egocentric, are most ‘passive’ and obviously victims, like Jules and Jim who seem simply unmanly and impotent as they are drawn down to destruction by the increasingly mad Catherine (it is she who becomes the monster, the chief dark figure of the story). The pitiful Don José is little more than a passive victim of Carmen’s wiles, until the closing scene where he is turned into a raging monster by his desperate frustration at losing her. Even Faustus is much more a victim than an ‘active’ hero, because it is always Mephistopheles who is pulling the strings and making a fool of him, and he does no serious or obvious harm to anyone else (although in Goethe’s version Faust is made to violate and then brutally reject an Innocent Young Girl, Margareta, whose consequent death marks the climax of Part One of the story).
The other category includes those heroes whose motivation is tinged by consideration for something higher and nobler than just their own personal gratification. Few of the examples we have looked at so far might seem to fall under such a heading, with the exception of Brutus: though even he, after a revealing inner moral struggle, puts his hand to the cold-blooded murder of one of his oldest friends, at the instigation of two others, the ‘envious’ Casca and the ‘lean and hungry’ Cassius, whose motivation may not be so obviously high-minded.
But here, as we consider the possibility of tragedies where there may be some redeeming feature to the hero, we are beginning to move on to another level of this plot altogether.
The essence of Tragedy as we have seen it so far is that it shows a hero or heroine who commits some great offence and is then drawn down, step by step, into paying the price. We are never in much doubt in such stories as to where the balance lies between darkness and light. At the outset, the hero or heroine may be made up of both light and dark qualities. But their dark side prevails, and as they remain set on their disastrous course without serious deviation or change of course, they tend to become darker and darker, while the light in the story constellates more and more outside them: first and most poignantly in their innocent victims; finally, triumphantly, in those who gather in opposition to overthrow them. This is why some tragedies, such as Macbeth or Richard III, can even end on a note of solemn rejoicing. The great life-denying monster who has increasingly cast his shadow on all around has at last been overthrown. Life can begin to flow again. Ultimately the destruction of the dark hero has been a victory for light.
But we are about to look at some familiar examples of Tragedy where the balance between darkness and light falls rather differently. First we are going to look at two stories which begin in familiar tragic manner, but where the hero does not just plunge blindly on towards destruction. As the story progresses he begins to go through a real change of heart. Instead of becoming darker and darker as he gets further locked into egocentricity, he begins to turn into a light figure, even though it is not enough ultimately to save him from destruction. Next we shall look at another story which begins with the hero showing a fatal weakness: but here it is not so much a change of heart which alters the tone of the ending as his recovery of manly strength, which enables him to turn his death into a glorious victory. Then we shall look at a great Tragedy where the hero eventually manages to purge himself of the darkness which has infected him, and is released. Finally we shall look at two stories right at the other end of the spectrum from those in which the hero is a monster, the centre of darkness. These are tragedies where, by a complete inversion of the usual pattern, the hero or the hero and heroine are almost wholly light throughout the story, and where the darkness which finally engulfs them springs entirely from society outside them.
Each of these six stories presents the tragic theme with a slightly different emphasis. Between them they may serve to extend this introductory survey of Tragedy to include more or less the full range of basic variations of which this extraordinarily important plot is capable.
At the start of King Lear we are left in no doubt that the hero is about to make a potentially tragic error, His wishes to divest himself of the cares and responsibilities of kingship, while still wishing to enjoy the honours and privileges which attach to being a king. He plans to divide his kingdom between his three daughters, and puts them to a test by asking them how much they love him. But when Goneril and Reagan make flowery, empty protestations of their love, it is obvious that he is allowing himself to be deceived. When Cordelia, the youngest, makes a plain little declaration that she loves him no more and no less than is right and proper, he can no longer recognise the truth at all. He angrily rejects her, his ‘good angel’; she goes off into exile with the equally honest Kent, and the seeds of Tragedy are sown.
Although it is Lear’s judgement which has been darkened, and which has led him into acting heartlessly and rejecting true love, it is already evident that he is primarily a victim of his own weakness rather than an active monster. The real sources of darkness in the story, the monsters unleashed by his weakness, are his heartless, false daughters Goneril and Reagan who inherit the power in his kingdom; while as a shadow to the drama of filial treachery which is about to unfold we also see the ageing Gloucester being likewise fooled by the ‘sweet words’ of his villainous bastard son Edmund, as he rejects his loving and true son Edgar.
The Dream Stage of Lear’s fantasy, while he can imagine that he still enjoys the honour of a king and the love of his two dark daughters, does not last long. Soon Frustration sets in, as Goneril and Reagan begin to treat their father with increasing contempt, until they reject him altogether.
The Nightmare Stage begins, with the poor, weak old man wandering through a stormy night on the desolate heath, accompanied only by the Fool and by the loyal Kent, who has returned from exile to serve his king in disguise. From now on the conflict between love and treachery, light and dark, carries the play into reaches of complexity such as are rarely touched on by the more straightforward type of Tragedy. Firstly, as a premonition of what is to come, we see the drama of Gloucester who, after rejecting his true son Edgar, rejoins the forces of light by ministering to the helpless Lear, for which he has his eyes torn out by the dark sisters. Now as helpless as Lear, he is rescued by his rejected but still loving son Edgar, who comes to him in disguise and cures him of his desire to commit suicide. Then, similarly, the rejected but still loving Cordelia arrives from France to rescue her father and nurse him back to sanity, in such a way that for the first time in the story Lear begins to see the truth and to recognise and feel real love.
Finally there is a battle, in which the forces of darkness seem to be victorious, with Lear and Cordelia taken prisoner. But almost at once the forces of darkness fall out amongst themselves. The three chief dark figures, Reagan, Goneril and Edmund, having been drawn down into the vortex of their own multiple treachery, all destroy each other. Unfortunately, as a last legacy of the evil that has possessed them, they have left the order by which Cordelia is hanged. The supreme, shining symbol of pure and selfless love, the ‘good angel’ of the entire story, has been put to death – and Lear dies broken-hearted. We end this bleakest of all Shakespeare’s plays with the sense that, although love had begun its work to win some degree of redemption from the general catastrophe, it was not enough. The forces of darkness unleashed by Lear’s initial act of heartless folly had proved too powerful. And although they themselves had ultimately brought about their own destruction, by the end they have extinguished ‘light’ with them, leaving only its shining memory behind.
A very different tragedy which shows the hero going through a profound and positive change of heart is Wagner’s opera Tannhäuser. Again, the move towards light is not enough to save the hero from catastrophe, but this time there is more of a hint of hope at the end.
When we first meet Tannhäuser, he is in the Frustration Stage of his story. For a year he has been living on the Venusberg, the mountain of Venus, enjoying with the goddess the delights of sensual love, in a prolonged Dream Stage. But he has found the dream insubstantial, and now he yearns for something more satisfying. Escaping back to the real world, he finds that a song contest has been arranged and that the prize is the hand of the pure and beautiful Elizabeth, who has long loved and waited for him. She is his ‘good angel’. Tannhäuser enters the contest, but when his turn comes to sing he is still so infected with the poison of Venus, his ‘evil angel’, that he cannot help singing shamelessly of her delights. Everyone is outraged, except the faithful Elizabeth. When the hero ‘comes to himself’ again, he is filled with remorse, and Elizabeth’s father orders him to go to Rome to seek full absolution from the Pope.
A long time elapses, and Elizabeth goes out to watch in vain for Tannhäuser’s return. She gives up hope. Finally he appears, broken and weary, and we learn that the Pope has decreed it would no more be possible for him to grant Tannhäuser forgiveness than for his papal staff to bring forth leaves. Tannhäuser, in despair, is for the last time tempted to return to his dream-life with Venus, who appears to him in a vision, but when he invokes the name of Elizabeth, the goddess disappears. In fact Elizabeth, equally despairing of ever being united with her love, had died of sorrow. Tannhäuser sees her body being carried past, embraces her and dies. Pilgrims enter, carrying the Pope’s wooden staff. It has put forth both leaves and flowers. Tannhäuser’s sin has been purged. He has at last been united with his ‘good angel’, if only in death.
Both Tannhäuser and King Lear show their hero going through a change of heart under the inspiration of his ‘good angel’, which begins to reverse the downward tendency of the plot, drawing it upwards again towards a happy ending – though neither quite reach it. In our next example, the downward tendency is similarly reversed, although this time not through the hero discovering his capacity for true love so much as through him recovering his masculine strength. Once again it is not enough to save him from the ultimate disaster which his initial weakness has set in train, but his ‘return to himself’ is sufficient to change the whole character of the story’s ending.
For twenty years Samson has been a judge over Israel. We know three things about him. The first is that he possesses superhuman strength, which is particularly important since his people are locked in continual conflict with their deadly rivals, the Philistines. The second is that he has long hair, in which somehow the secret of his strength resides; if it is ever cut, he will become as weak as any ordinary mortal. The third is that he already has another weakness, for women.
One day he goes out to sleep with a prostitute, and while he is with her he is nearly trapped by the Philistines. Only his superhuman strength enables him to escape. But it is a warning of what is to come. Next he falls in love with another woman, Delilah, and this time the Philistines are more cunning. They realise that it is no good tackling him on his superior function, his physical strength: they must go behind it, to his weakness, and they bribe Delilah to use her loving wiles to wheedle out of him the secret of where his strength lies. Three times she tries, and each time he brushes her aside with a misleading answer. But when she persists, throwing everything into her final attempt by the age-old device of pleading ‘How can you say you love me when you won’t tell me the truth?’, he finally and fatally weakens. He reveals his secret, she waits until he is asleep and has his hair shaven off. When he wakes up, it is too late. He has fallen into the hands of the Philistines and is too weak to free himself.
From this Frustration Stage, Samson is quickly thrust into the Nightmare Stage, when the Philistines put out his eyes, bind him ‘with fetters of brass’ and ‘he did grind in the prison house’. But what the Philistines forget is that, while he is in prison, Samson’s hair will grow again.
They throw a great feast, to celebrate their capture of their deadly enemy. Three thousand Philistines gather in a great building, and when they are drunk they call for Samson to be brought in so they can mock him. He asks the boy who is leading him to guide his hand to the pillars of the building, so he can lean on them. Then, calling on his God, and with a final superhuman heave of his now recovered strength, Samson pulls the whole building down, killing everyone in it: ‘so the dead which he slew at his death were more than they which he slew in his life’. It is his greatest victory.
There are important issues raised by this tale to which we shall have to return, because they have implications central to the nature of storytelling and the different psychological levels on which the basic stories can be told. As the story is presented to us, for instance, the Philistines are cast as wholly dark, unredeemedly evil; although they doubtless behaved little differently from the way the Israelites themselves would have done if they had caught the champion and strongman of the Philistines (e.g., the portrayal of Goliath). In this respect Samson’s victory over ‘evil’ can only be seen in partial terms: we can hardly see it as a great life-renewing act, an absolute victory for life over death. But in our next example, one of the most profound tragedies in literature, we get right down to bedrock: with a play which looks head on at one of the most fundamental questions which Tragedy can pose.
It is a curious fact about Greek Tragedy that so few of the plays which have survived from its golden age in the fifth century BC present the tragic theme simply in its basic five-stage form. From Aristotle we know the general theory which the Greeks developed to account for the fact that they found themselves telling stories in this way: a central part of which was that tragedy should show a hero or heroine, otherwise noble in character, but with a fatal flaw which catches them out, leading to their destruction. This might seem a perfect summing up of the story of Samson; indeed of many of the tragedies we have been looking at. In practice, however, one of the strengths of the Greek tragedians (as of the Greek mind generally) was their capacity to appreciate the complexities of human existence. They were not satisfied with black-and-white answers. They were always looking round the corner for another question to ask. Despite Aristotle’s dictum that a satisfactory story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, they were always asking ‘what happened before the beginning?’, ‘what happened after the end?’, which is why so many of the stories in their mythology seem to meander on interminably, with each episode before its conclusion sowing the seeds for the next. And one of the most basic questions posed by Tragedy is this: if a tragic hero arouses such opposition by his actions that he is eventually put to death by someone else (which is after all where the tragic pattern so often ends up), where morally does that leave the person who has killed him? Is it not possible that the avenger too, in killing another human being (for whatever reason), may not have become infected by something of the very evil he is trying to counter? Is it not possible that someone else, in further revenge, may wish to kill him in turn? Where does the killing stop? Where, in any episode involving an outbreak of evil and violent conflict, can the darkness be said to have been finally eliminated?
This is the question posed by the only complete trilogy of tragedies to have survived from ancient Greece, the Oresteia of Aeschylus.
We begin with the tragic cycle which is unleashed when the great king of Mycenae, Agamemnon, returns home victorious from the Trojan War. During the years he has been away, his wife Clytemnaestra has enjoyed a long adulterous affair with his cousin Aegisthus. At the prospect of her husband returning, she conceives a treacherous plan to murder him, succumbing to the fantasy that she will then be able to marry Aegisthus and settle down to many more peaceful years of life in Mycenae (Anticipation Stage). When Agamemnon returns, she promptly commits the dark deed, in peculiarly shocking manner. She gives him a lavish welcome, prepares a hot bath and stabs him three times as he lies in it (along with the Trojan prophetess Cassandra whom he has brought home with him). She then comes out of the palace to proclaim to the world what she has done, exultantly describing how her husband’s blood had spurted forth at her blows. The first play of the trilogy, the Agamemnon, thus ends on the Dream Stage of her fantasy, as she and Aegisthus rejoice at their deliverance.
As the second play, the Choeophori, begins, the murderous pair are into the Frustration Stage. Clytemnaestra is being troubled by ominous dreams. Worse, her son by Agamemnon, Orestes, who has escaped into exile, has now returned secretly to Mycenae where he meets his sister Electra. They conspire to avenge their father: opposition is constellating against the murderers. Orestes wins admittance to the palace by arriving in disguise and promptly kills Aegisthus. After putting the villainess Clytemnaestra through a Nightmare Stage, by holding her beneath his sword while telling her at length what he thinks of her wickedness, he kills her too. The monster has been overthrown. The five-stage cycle which began with Clytemnaestra conceiving the plan to murder her husband is concluded.
But suddenly Orestes, the triumphant instrument of vengeance, finds himself surrounded by the Eumenides, the horrible, shrieking Furies, threatening him with destruction in turn. After all, he has committed one of the gravest crimes imaginable, by killing his own mother. Who is to say that this should not properly be the beginning of a new tragic cycle, and that he should not pay the price for his crime? Precisely this question is the theme of the concluding play of the trilogy, the Eumenides.
Pursued by the shrieking, taunting Furies, Orestes tries to take sanctuary in the holiest spot of the Greek world, the temple of Apollo at Delphi. Here he is told that he must go to Athens to see the goddess of wisdom Athene, who will finally decide where justice lies.
The play concludes with Orestes in effect on trial for his life, with the vengeful Furies leading for the prosecution. Orestes pleads in his own defence that he has committed a crime, but only in righteous punishment for one much more terrible. Furthermore he has already suffered grievously for it by having to endure the torments of the Furies (who also represent the torments of conscience). Athene finally agrees that, through his suffering and remorse, he has purged his sin and should be released. The Eumenides are conciliated by the promise of a permanent place of honour in Athenian life. The play ends with the sense of some huge shadow having at last been lifted, enabling life once again to flow free.
An important aspect of the argument in the Eumenides is the general admission that Orestes has committed a crime, but that he had been able to expiate it. In other words, in committing his act of vengeance, he has become a dark figure (though nothing like so dark as Clytemnaestra), and only by enduring his subsequent sufferings has he won his way through to become a light figure again.
What are we to make of tragedies where the central figure or figures are not dark at all? We come finally to two stories where the usual balance of darkness and light between the central figures and the world around them is completely reversed.
The story of Romeo and Juliet unfolds precisely through the five stages of the tragic cycle. But the great difference between this and all the other tragedies at which we have looked lies in where we see the fundamental split or division which contains the seeds of catastrophe. It is not so much Romeo or Juliet themselves who present us with the spectacle of a ‘divided self’. The split lies in the great feud dividing their two families. The desire of the hero or heroine is not to promote conflict but to escape from it. In other words, the fault which sets them at odds with those around them lies not in themselves but outside them.
As the play opens we are at once made aware of how deep and combustible is the rift between the Montagues and the Capulets by the casual suddenness with which a brawl between members of the two households breaks out in a Verona street. We are then drawn into the Anticipation Stage as we learn how Romeo is already detached from the conflict by lovesickness. He is actually hoping to gate-crash the Capulets’ ball to catch sight of the girl he loves, Rosaline. At the same time the young daughter of the Capulets, Juliet, is being told by her mother that she must bend her thoughts towards marriage, with a young man called Paris. We might almost be in the opening stages of a Comedy, with both hero and heroine headed for the wrong partners. But then, at the ball, they meet, and at once fall in love. They have found their Focus. The height of the Dream Stage quickly follows when they declare their love for each other (the ‘Balcony scene’) and secretly get married under the auspices of the wise old Friar Laurence.
The Frustration Stage begins when the shadow of the great feud intrudes on their love. The hot-tempered young Capulet Tybalt comes looking for Romeo, furious at how he had gatecrashed the ball in disguise. Full of the spirit of love, Romeo has no wish to fight; but when Tybalt kills his friend Mercutio, Romeo is at last infected by the darkness and is drawn into killing Tybalt in reply. It is this dark act which precipitates the fatal conclusion. The frustration of the lovers quickly worsens as Romeo is banished and Juliet’s father (in the guise of ‘unrelenting father’) prepares to marry her off to Paris (not knowing, of course, that she is already married).
The Nightmare Stage begins, as Juliet desperately tries to escape from the approaching threat of the false marriage. Friar Laurence masterminds the plan whereby she takes a drug which makes it seem that she is dead. She is taken to the family tomb, with the intention that Romeo will come secretly at night and carry her off. And if this were Comedy, with Juliet merely in eclipse, like those other heroines who feign death, Hermione in A Winter’s Tale and Hero in Much Ado, such might be the happy denouement. But here there is to be no ‘recognition’. The course of deception, once embarked on, leads only to the wrong people being deceived, and misunderstanding becomes fatal. Romeo is led to believe that Juliet is truly dead and commits suicide by her side. She wakes to find that he is dead and follows suit. They achieve their final union only in death.
If this were all there was to the story, we should feel that it had come to a very bleak conclusion indeed, with the forces of darkness triumphant. But, of course, what happens is that the two families, when they learn of the catastrophe, are so appalled that they go collectively through a profound change of heart. Reconciled in mutual grief, they call off their ancient feud. We see how, in their terrible deaths, Romeo and Juliet have redeemed the divided world of Verona, enabling the story to end on an image of wholeness restored and life renewed.
At least Romeo and Juliet could not have been drawn down to their catastrophe unless Romeo himself had eventually been infected by the darkness surrounding them, in his killing of Tybalt. But finally we come to a story where the hero is not infected by the darkness surrounding him at all. We have come, in short, right to the other end of the tragic spectrum from those stories which show the hero as a monster, to the point where he is completely a centre of light. Yet, interestingly, this is precisely the reverse of how he at first appears.
The hero of Paul Gallico’s little tale The Snow Goose, written in England in 1940 during the darkest days of the Second World War, is Philip Rhayader, a painter, who lives all alone in an abandoned lighthouse on the Essex marshes.
To the inhabitants of the nearby community, this mysterious solitary figure seems to be a monster. Rhayader is a hunchback, his left arm is ‘crippled, thin and bent at the wrist, like the claw of a bird’. But we soon learn that in reality, despite his ‘mis-shapen body and dark visage’, Rhayader is as far from being a monster as it is possible to be, In every other sense he is a whole man, a superb sailor, strong and at the same time gentle, full of love for ‘man, the animal kingdom and all nature’. He lives alone on the marshes because he is at home with the birds and the sea, which form the subject of his ‘luminous’ canvases.
In other words, as he is revealed to us, Rhayader is all light and the darkness in the story is all outside him, initially in his neighbours who regard the solitary hunchback out on the marshes with suspicion, hostility and fear.
But one day one of these neighbours comes to him, a frightened little girl carrying an injured snow goose she has found. He knows at once how to look after the bird, which he calls ‘The Lost Princess’, and the girl Frith comes regularly to visit him, to see how the bird is getting on. Eventually the snow goose, fully recovered, flies away. Frith’s visits stop and Rhayader ‘learned all over again the meaning of the word “loneliness”’. The child and the ‘Princess’ have become intertwined together, profoundly important to him.
The following year, to Rhayader’s amazement and joy, the ‘Princess’ returns. He leaves a message for Frith, who resumes her visits until the bird again flies off for the summer – and this pattern continues for several years, with Rhayader enjoying alternations of happiness and loneliness, each time Frith and the great bird come back into his life for a while and then disappear again.
Then three things happen, more or less simultaneously. First, Rhayader realises that Frith is no longer just a wild little girl: she has grown up into a young woman. Second, the snow goose does not fly away as usual, but had obviously decided to stay at the lighthouse: ‘the Lost Princess is no more. This is her home now – of her own free will.’ Both Rhayader and Frith are aware of a tumult of new feelings, involving each other, which neither dares speak of. But thirdly, the darkness and conflict of the world outside suddenly intrude on them in a new and much more violent way.
It is 1940, the time of Dunkirk. Rhayader, the sailor, decides that he must answer the call for the ‘little boats’ to help in the evacuation, and sails off with the snow goose flying over him, like a guardian angel, straight into the nightmare of the Dunkirk beaches. Amid this deafening hell of smoke, gunfire, exploding bombs and death, he performs astonishing feats of heroism, rescuing hundreds of men, until finally he is machine-gunned. His boat is spotted drifting through the smoke and chaos, his body slumped over the tiller, with the great bird still watching over him – until the boat is blown to pieces by a mine. But for all who have encountered him in that hell, he has become an almost legendary, supernatural figure. For days Frith waits looking out for him, until the ‘Princess’ returns to circle round her, as if to tell her that Rhayader is not coming back. A few weeks later a stray German bomber blasts the lighthouse out of existence.
Obviously there is something profoundly positive even about this very bleak ending. We began by seeing Rhayader rejected and taken by everyone around him to be a ‘monster’, even though the fault lay only in themselves. By his selfless and heroic end, we finally see his true nature revealed to the world in such a way that he becomes a redeemer, he and his bird a vision of ‘light’ amid the terrible surrounding darkness. It is a story which triumphantly turns the usual theme of Tragedy inside out.
One of the subtler clues to the meaning of the tragic pattern lies in the origins of the word ‘tragedy’ itself, coming as it does from the Greek 
, a ‘goat’. It is derived from the ancient ritual practice of the ‘scapegoat’, whereby a goat or some other creature could be sacrificed to restore health to the community. The animal (or human) scapegoat was regarded as symbolically carrying the sins of the tribe; with the idea that, in its death, those sins were purged and the tribe brought back to wholeness. The pattern this re-enacted was precisely that we see at the end of a tragedy, where a whole community has been cast into shadow by the darkness emanating from the central figure. The removal of that source of darkness brings the community back into the light.
We have come a long way since we first began to explore this strange pattern in storytelling which shows how human beings may get caught up in a course of action which leads eventually to their violent and unnatural death. We have been through some of the darkest stories in the world. We have seen people, possessed by some egocentric fantasy of love or power, gradually separating themselves from everyone around them, more and more submerged in the darkness which springs from their own split, disordered psyches, until finally the violent rejection they have shown to others turns in on themselves. But we have also seen how it is possible for this downward spiral into darkness to be reversed: how it is possible for the hero or heroine to begin to knot together again, within themselves and with others around them, so that light is again breaking in on their darkness.
So far, because we have been looking at Tragedy, we have only seen this return to the light able to operate partially, ultimately insufficient to prevail against the forces of darkness which have been unleashed, and which eventually sweep the hero or heroine away. But there are, of course, stories which show that climb upward from darkness reaching its ultimate triumphant conclusion, where the hero or heroine can re-emerge into the light altogether. This leads us on to the next and last of the basic plots.