महावीरचरितम् (महाकवि भवभूति - वीररस-प्रधान रामकथा नाटक सम्पूर्ण ७ अङ्क सटीक)

xxiii] Proposed by the General Editor of this Series

pāda 4. But i. 5⁴ means act i, prose-passage immediately following stanza 5, subdivision 4.—It will be observed that this method has the incidental advantage (a very considerable one) of showing on its face whether a line of poetry or a line of prose is intended.—The prose-passages vary in length from a single word to several pages. Examples of long prose-passages (forty to sixty lines) in the Śākuntala are those following i. 24, vi. 1, vi. 24, vii. 20. Precision of reference (and not alone the need of distinguishing prose-citations from stanza-citations) requires a third element indicating the subdivision.—What then shall this subdivision of the prose-passage be? The subdivision of the prose-passage should be the printed line.— The natural subdivisions of a prose-passage are the single speeches. But these are very uneven in length, and the numbers employed to indicate them would come at such irregular intervals and places on the page as not to be readily caught by the eye (a grave disadvantage). Moreover, a single speech is sometimes so long that a single number would not show precisely enough where a word or phrase is. In the case of prose-passages, therefore, it is best to use the printed line as the basis of subdivision, and to place the line-numbers at brief and regular intervals, and always in the same relative position on the page, that is, in the left-hand margin, and never in the right-hand margin. The numbering of the lines of the prose-passage must of course start anew with each new passage (canon 2, p. xix). The numbering of the lines or of the speeches from the beginning of the act is ruled out as wholly illogical and as a source of confusion (canon 1).¹ In Konow's Karpūra-mañjarī, Cambridge, 1901, the numbers of the act, and of the stanza as counted from the beginning of the act, are clearly shown. For the prose between two consecutive stanzas, I have numbered each clause (not speech and not line) of prose, counting from the prior stanza. The disadvantage of this method is that the numbers have to be put at irregular intervals and in irregular positions, and are therefore not easily caught by the eye. The disadvantage is so serious as to condemn this my former method.

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¹ The Mālavikāgnimitra of Mr. S. P. Pandit, Bombay, 1889, numbers the stanzas from the beginning of the act. But it also numbers the speeches from the beginning of the act, without distinction of prose and verse or of Sanskrit and Prākrit. Mr. Pandit makes a great gain in sim- plicity by using the same numbers (many, of course, are skipped) for reference to his chhāyā and his variants on the lower part of the page and to his notes at the end of the volume. His speech-numbers are very easily caught by the eye because they are always in the same relative position, a free vertical column on the left-hand edge of the page, no matter whether it is a right-hand page or a left- hand page. So far as convenience goes, I have long deemed this to be the best edition of its time among Sanskrit plays. Only the speeches are sometimes too long for a precise citation, and the numbering of speeches from the beginning of the act is wrong in principle.