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

Introduction [lxxxiv progress. Men also had grown and witnessed changes of station. Thus king Janaka has for some years given up the offices of state and sought solace in retirement (iv. 12⁷); the demon Lavaṇa, who broke upon us at the close of act i, has been killed and his · kingdom is now in the hands of Śatrughna (vii. 19²⁹; cp. Rāmāyaṇa, vii. 70–71); and the twelve-year session of the sacrifice (i. 4¹, ii. 6¹²) has come to an end. But amid this fluctuation there were also elements of constancy. The mountains remain unchanged (ii. 27ᵈ); the deer still remember her who used to feed them in the kadalī grove in the Pañchavaṭī (iii. 22⁵, 26; cp. also Kādambarī, p. 21, ll. 19–20); Rāma is constant and devoted to the memory of his wife;¹ and above all, the holy pair, Vasiṣṭha and Arundhatī, still continue to guard the interests of the Raghu family, and, out of the calamities that have happened and that they in part had foreseen (iv. 17⁶), they succeed in working a prosperous issue. 44. Defects of the Uttara-Rāma-charita.—The play, in spite of its great excellence, is not entirely free from faults. Thus the poet still retains—though in a far less degree—his old fondness for long descriptions and alliterative compounds. These are particularly obtrusive in acts v and vi. Elsewhere also the poet would have done better to condense and omit so as to secure a general quickening of the action; and if the results of appendixes 6 and 8 are correct, it would seem that the author himself sanctioned such curtailment for stage-purposes. Secondly, Bhavabhūti has not yet quite got over his fondness for display, and his points are sometimes laboured. The sentiment of the play is on the whole very real, but in its expression we sometimes catch a jarring note. Thus Rāma brings his ‘heart’s vitals’ rather too frequently into his speeches, and not all the faintings in the play are as inevitable and as artistically necessary as that of Rāma at iii. 39¹. Particularly infelicitous are the Vidyādhara- Vidyādharī sentiments at vi. 4 ff. and especially vi. 5. Finally, we may mention that in none of Bhavabhūti’s extant plays do we (except in U. R. C., act iv) find any pronounced humour. Bhavabhūti’s humour, what little there is of it, is of the purely intellectual character and springs more from situation and irony (e. g. U. R. C. vi. 19¹² ᶠ, iv. 22²⁰, iii. 46¹⁶). Only once does Sītā herself indulge in a joke (i. 18²) and even then it is of the sober matronly kind quite in accord with her character. This absence in Bhavabhūti’s plays of anything like a pervading lighter vein² may be due to the fact that the poet took his subject too seriously, felt in other ¹ Cp. p. lxxix, above, and also U. R. C. iii. 14⁶;    that Bhavabhūti was a conscious imi-   iii. 43¹⁴; vi. 38⁶; &c.            tator of Śūdraka in the ‘Clay Cart’. ² This by itself would rule out the theory