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’.