Archetype - in Literature and Art

In Literature and Art

Archetypes can be found in nearly all forms of literature, with their motifs being predominantly rooted in folklore.

William Butler Yeats completed an automatic writing with his wife (Georgie) Hyde-Lees. Their book, A Vision, contains a mapping and list of 28 archetypes by these characters' will and fate. Tarot cards depict a system of archetypes used for divination of a persons' fate or story. In the Noh plays of Japan, the characters are skillfully depicted with exaggerated expressions and elaborate costumes to clearly portray a system of archetypes.

William Shakespeare is responsible for popularizing several archetypal characters. Falstaff, the bawdy rotund comic knight; Romeo and Juliet, the ill-fated ("star-crossed") lovers; Richard II, the hero who dies with honour; and many others. Although Shakespeare based many of his characters on existing archetypes from fables and myths (e.g., Romeo and Juliet on Arthur Brooke's Romeus and Juliet), Shakespeare's characters stand out as original by their contrast against a complex social literary landscape. For instance, in The Tempest, Shakespeare borrowed from a manuscript by William Strachey that detailed an actual shipwreck of the Virginia-bound 17th-century English sailing vessel Sea Venture in 1609 on the islands of Bermuda. Shakespeare also borrowed heavily from a speech by Medea in Ovid's Metamorphoses in writing Prospero's renunciative speech; nevertheless, the combination of these elements in the character of Prospero created a new interpretation of the sage magician as that of a carefully plotting hero, quite distinct from the wizard-as-advisor archetype of Merlin or Gandalf. Both of these are likely derived from priesthood authority archetypes, such as Celtic Druids, or perhaps Biblical figures like Abraham, Moses, etc.; or in the case of Gandalf, the Norse figure Odin.

Certain common methods of character depiction employed in dramatic performance rely on the pre-existence of literary archetypes. Stock characters used in theatre or film are based on highly generic literary archetypes. A pastiche is an imitation of an archetype or prototype in order to pay homage to the original creator.

Sheri Tepper's novel Plague of Angels contains archetypical villages, essentially human zoos where a wide variety of archetypal people are kept, including heroes, orphans, oracles, ingénues, bastards, young lovers, poets, princesses, martyrs, and fools.

Similarly, the song "Atlantis" by the folk singer Donovan mentions twelve archetypal characters leaving the sinking Atlantis and spreading to the far corners of the world to bring civilization, though only five of the twelve are mentioned in the song:

Knowing her fate, Atlantis sent out ships to all corners of the Earth.
On board were the Twelve:
The poet, the physician, the farmer, the scientist, the magician,
And the other so-called Gods of our legends,
Though Gods they were.

The superhero genre is also frequently cited as emblematic of archetypal literature.

The young, flawed, and brooding antihero Spider-Man became the most widely imitated archetype in the superhero genre since the appearance of Superman and Batman.
—Bradford W. Wright, Comic Book Nation: The transformation of Youth Culture in America 212
—Superman on the Couch by Danny Fingeroth 151