Page:A history of Sanskrit literature (1900), Macdonell, Arthur Anthony.djvu/377

 dramatic poem than a play. The description of the tender love of Rāma and Sītā, purified by sorrow, exhibits more genuine pathos than appears perhaps in any other Indian drama. The play begins with the banishment of Sītā and ends with her restoration, after twelve years of grievous solitude, to the throne of Ayodhyā amid popular acclamations. Her two sons, born after her banishment and reared in the wilderness by the sage Vālmīki, without any knowledge of their royal descent, furnish a striking parallel to the two princes Guiderius and Arviragus who are brought up by the hermit Belarius in Shakespeare's Cymbeline. The scene in which their meeting with their father Rāma is described reaches a high degree of poetic merit.

Among the works of other dramatists, 's Mudrā-rākshasa, or "Rākshasa and the Seal," deserves special mention because of its unique character. For, unlike all the other dramas hitherto described, it is a play of political intrigue, composed, moreover, with much dramatic talent, being full of life, action, and sustained interest. Nothing more definite can be said as to its date than that it was probably written not later than about 800 A.D. The action of the piece takes place in the time of Chandragupta, who, soon after Alexander's invasion of India, founded a new dynasty at Pāṭaliputra by deposing the last king of the Nanda line. Rākshasa, the minister of the latter, refusing to recognise the usurper, endeavours to be avenged on him for the ruin of his late master. The plot turns on the efforts of the Brahman Chāṇakya, the minister of Chandragupta, to win over the noble Rākshasa to his master's cause. In this he is ultimately successful.

's Veṇīsaṃhāra, or "Binding of the