Page:The Sanskrit Drama.djvu/156

Rh him, until a voice from heaven tells him of a magic stone, armed with which he grasps a creeper which in his embrace turns into Urvaçī.

From this lyric height the drama declines in Act V. The king and his beloved are back in his capital; the moon festival is being celebrated, but the magic stone is stolen by a vulture, which, however, falls pierced by the arrow of a youthful archer; the arrow bears the inscription, 'the arrow of Āyus, son of Urvaçī and Purūravas'. The king had known nothing of the child, but, while he is amazed, a woman comes from a hermitage with a gallant boy, who, educated in the duties of his warrior caste, has by his slaying the bird violated the rule of the hermitage and is now returned to his mother. Urvaçī, summoned, admits her parentage, but, while Purūravas is glad, she weeps to think of their severance, now inevitable, since he has seen his son. But, while Purūravas is ready to abandon the realm to the boy and retire to the forest in grief, Nārada comes with a message of good tidings; a battle is raging between the gods and the demons; Purūravas's arms will be necessary, and in reward he may have Urvaçī's society for his life.

The play has come down in two recensions, one preserved in Bengālī and Devanāgarī manuscripts and commented on by Ran̄ganātha in A.D. 1656, and the other in South Indian manuscripts, commented on by Kāṭayavema, minister of the Reḍḍi prince, Kumāragiri of Koṇḍavīḍu about A.D. 1400. The most important among many differences is the fact that in Act IV the northern manuscripts give a series of Apabhraṅça verses, with directions as to the mode of singing and accompanying them, which are ignored in the southern manuscripts. The northern text calls the play a Troṭaka, apparently from the dance which accompanied the verses, the southern a Nāṭaka which it in essentials is. The arguments against the authenticity of the verses are partly the silence of the theorists, the fact that the existence in Kālidāsa's time of Apabhraṅça of the type found is more than dubious, that there is sometimes a degree of discrepancy between the verses and the prose of the drama, and that in the many imitations of the scene (Mālatīmadhava, Act IX, Bālarāmāyaṇa, Act V, Prasannarāghava, Act VI, and