Page:The Sanskrit Drama.djvu/253

248 vernacular verses are its only fixed element, but this is not likely to be a primitive feature.

Of dramas with lesser personages of the saga as heroes we have the Bhairavānanda of the Nepalese poet Maṇika from the end of the fourteenth century, and at least a century later the Bhartṛharinirveda of Harihara, which is interesting, as it shows the popularity of Bhartṛhari; he is represented as desolated by his wife's death, through despair on a false rumour of his own death, but, consoled by a Yogin, he attains indifference, so that, when his wife is recalled to life, neither she nor their child has any attraction for him.

Of historical drama we have little, and that of small value. The Lalitavigraharājanāṭaka, preserved in part in an inscription, is a work of the latter part of the twelfth century by Somadeva in honour of Visaladeva Vigraharāja, the Cāhamāna. The Pratāparudrakalyāṇa by Vidyānatha, inserted in his treatise on rhetoric as an illustration of the drama, celebrates his patron, a king of Warangal about A.D. 1300.

More interesting is the Hammīramadamardana, written between A.D. 1219 and 1229 by Jayasiṅha Sūri, the priest of the temple of Munisuvrata at Broach. It appears that Tejaḥpāla, brother of Vastupāla, minister of Vīradhavala of Gujarāt, visited the temple, and, with the assent of his brother, complied with the request of Jayasiṅha for the erection of twenty-five golden flagstaffs for Devakulikās. As a reward Jayasiṅha not merely celebrated the brothers in a panegyric, of which a copy has been preserved along with his drama, but wrote, to please Jayantasiṅha, son of Vastupāla, the play for performance at the festival of the procession of the god Bhīmeçvara at Cambay. He claims that it includes all nine sentiments, in contrast to Prakaraṇas, exploiting the sentiment of fear, with which the audience has been surfeited.

In Act I, after the introductory dialogue between the Sūtradhara and an actor, Vīradhavala is brought in, conversing with Tejaḥpāla, the theme being the extraordinary merits of Vastu-