TALES FROM THE HINDU DRAMATISTS - Awaken Video

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
personae_. 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.
THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE SANSKRIT DRAMA.
According to the code of criticism laid down in works on Sanskrit drama,
it should deal principally either with the sentiment of love, or the
heroic sentiment; the other sentiments should have a subsidiary
position. There should be four or five principal characters, and the
number of acts should vary from five to ten.
There are several species of the drama,--ten principal, and eighteen
minor. Of these none has a tragic end.
Every drama opens with a prologue or, to speak more correctly, an
introduction designed to prepare the way for the entrance of the
dramatis personae. The prologue commences with a prayer or benediction
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