Page:The Sanskrit Drama.djvu/248

Rh drama and those of real life. In Bhāsa's days and even those of Kālidāsa we may imagine that there was not too great difficulty in following the main features of the drama both in Sanskrit and in Prākrit, but the gulf between the popular languages and those of learning went on widening every year, and Rājaçekhara, as we have seen, was, despite his boasted studies, of which we have no reason to doubt, unable to discriminate correctly his Prākrits. It in no wise disproves this view that the Lalitavigraharājanaṭaka of Somadeva shows a close connexion with the language as laid down in Hemacandra's grammar, for, as that work preceded the play in date and was produced at the court of Aṇhilvāḍ, which was in close connexion with that of Sambhär, where Somadeva lived, we need not doubt that copies of Hemacandra's work were available for the production of artificial Prākrit.

It was clearly a very different thing to compose in Sanskrit and Prākrit in A.D. 1000, when the vernaculars were beginning to assume literary form, than in A.D. 400, and the difficulty of composition in any effective manner must have rapidly increased with the years, and the growth of the realization that it was idle to seek fame under modern circumstances by the composition of dramas, for which there was no popular audience and only a limited market. What is amazing is that for centuries the Sanskrit drama continued to be produced in very substantial numbers, as the existence of manuscripts proves, and that so strong was the force of tradition that the first attempt to introduce the vernacular into the drama by Bidyāpati Ṭhākur in Behar took the form of producing works in which the characters use Sanskrit and Prākrit and the songs only are in Maithilī. So powerful has been the strength of the Sanskrit drama that it is only in the nineteenth century that vernacular drama has exhibited itself in Hindi, and in general it is only very recently that the drama has seemed proper for vernacular expression. But the writing in artificial languages has revenged itself on the writers; their works are reminiscent of modern copies of Greek or Latin verses, which only too painfully reveal through all the artifices suggested by careful study the impossibility of the production of real poetry, not to mention drama, in dead languages. It is significant in this regard that perhaps the most interesting of later dramas is the Prabodhacandrodaya of Kṛṣṇamiçra, a