Sanskrit plays are full of lyrical passages describing scenes or persons
presented to view, or containing reflections suggested by the incidents
that occur. They usually consist of four-line stanzas. The prose of the
dialogue in the plays is often very commonplace, serving only as an
introduction to the lofty sentiment of the poetry that follows.
The Sanskrit drama is a mixed composition in which joy is mingled with
sorrow, in which the jester usually plays a prominent part, while the
hero and heroine are often in the depths of despair. But it never has a
sad ending. The emotions of terror, grief, or pity, with which the
audience are inspired, are therefore always tranquillised by the happy
termination of the story. Nor may any deeply tragic incident take place
in the course of the play; for death is never allowed to be represented
on the stage. Indeed, nothing considered indecorous, whether of a
serious or comic character, is allowed to be enacted in the sight or
hearing of the spectators, such as the utterance of a curse,
degradation, banishment, national calamity, biting, scratching, kissing,
eating, or sleeping.
Love, according to Hindu notions, is the subject of most of their
dramas. The hero, who is generally a king, and already the husband of a
wife or wives, is suddenly smitten with the charms of a lovely woman,
sometimes a nymph, or, as in the case of Sakuntala, the daughter of a
nymph by a mortal father. The heroine is required to be equally
impressible, and the first tender glance from the hero's eye reaches her
heart. With true feminine delicacy, however, she locks the secret of her
passion in her own breast, and by her coyness and reserve keeps her
lover for a long period in the agonies of suspense. The hero, being
reduced to a proper state of desperation, is harassed by other
difficulties. Either the celestial nature of the nymph is in the way of
their union, or he doubts the legality of the match, or he fears his own
unworthiness, or he is hampered by the angry jealousy of a previous
wife. In short, doubts, obstacles and delays make great havoc of both
hero and heroine. They give way to melancholy, indulge in amorous
rhapsodies, and become very emaciated. So far the story is decidedly
dull, and its pathos, notwithstanding the occasional grandeur and beauty
of imagery, often verges on the ridiculous. But, by way of relief, an
element of life is generally introduced in the character of the
Vidushaka, or Jester, who is the constant companion of the hero; and in
the young maidens, who are confidential friends of the heroine, and soon
become possessed of her secret. By a curious regulation, the jester is
always a Brahman, and, therefore, of a caste superior to the king
himself; yet his business is to excite mirth by being ridiculous in
person, age, and attire. He is represented as grey-haired, hump-backed,
lame and hideously ugly. In fact, he is a species of buffoon, who is
allowed full liberty of speech, being himself a universal butt. His
attempts at wit, which are rarely very successful, and his allusions to
the pleasures of the table, of which he is a confessed votary, are
absurdly contrasted with the sententious solemnity of the despairing
hero, crossed in the prosecution of his love-suit. His clumsy
interference with the intrigues of his friend, only serves to augment
his difficulties, and occasions many an awkward dilemma. On the other
hand, the shrewdness of the heroine's confidantes never seem to fail
them under the most trying circumstances; while their sly jokes and
innuendos, their love of fun, their girlish sympathy with the progress
of the love-affair, their warm affection for their friend, heighten the
interest of the plot, and contribute not a little to vary its monotony.
Indeed, if a calamitous conclusion be necessary to constitute a tragedy,
the Hindu dramas are never tragedies. They are mixed compositions, in
which joy and sorrow, happiness and misery, are woven in a mingled
web,--tragi-comic representations, in which good and evil, right and
wrong, truth and falsehood, are allowed to mingle in confusion during
the first acts of the drama. But, in the last act, harmony is always
restored, order succeeds to disorder, tranquillity to agitation; and the
mind of the spectator, no longer perplexed by the apparent ascendancy of
evil, is soothed, and purified, and made to acquiesce in the moral
lesson deducible from the plot.
In comparison with the Greek and the modern drama, Nature occupies a
much more important place in Sanskrit plays. The characters are
surrounded by Nature, with which they are in constant communion. The
mango and other trees, creepers, lotuses, and pale-red trumpet-flowers,
gazelles, flamingoes, bright-hued parrots, and Indian cuckoos, in the
midst of which they move, are often addressed by them and form an
essential part of their lives. Hence the influence of Nature on the
minds of lovers is much dwelt on. Prominent everywhere in classical
Sanskrit poetry, these elements of Nature luxuriate most of all in the
drama.
The dramas of Bhavabhuti except Malati-Madhava, and the whole herd of
the later dramatic authors, relate to the heroic traditions of the
Ramayana and the Mahabharata, or else to the history of Krishna; and the
later the pieces are, the more do they resemble the so-called
'mysteries' of the middle ages. The comedies, which, together with a
few other pieces, move in the sphere of civil life, form, of course, an
exception to this. A peculiar class of dramas are the philosophical
ones, in which abstractions and systems appear as the _dramatis
personæ_. One very special peculiarity of the Hindu drama is that women,
and persons of inferior rank, station, or caste are introduced as
speaking the _Prakrit_ or vulgarised Sanskrit, while the language of the
higher and more educated classes is the classical Sanskrit of the
present type.