Page:The Sanskrit Drama.djvu/298

Rh his model; his four books of wooden verses treat first of the subject-matter and plot; then of the hero, the heroine, and other characters, and the language of the drama; thirdly of the prologue and the different kinds of drama; and lastly of the emotions and sentiments, thus concentrating attention on the essential dramatic features. The text is naturally often unintelligible save in the light of the Nāṭyaçāstra itself and of the commentary, Avaloka, which is ascribed to Dhanika, son of Viṣṇu, and minister of Utpaladeva, a term which is an alias of Muñja. The identity of the two writers is suggested by the fact that later writers ascribe passages of the Dāçarūpa itself to Dhanika, and that without the commentary the work is in a sense incomplete. But, on the other hand, in a few passages the commentator more or less distinctly differs from the text, and it seems sufficient to assume that they may have been brothers. The Avaloka must have been completed after Muñja's death, since it cites Padmagupta's Navasāhasān̄kacarita, which was written under Sindhurāja, and this throws some doubt on the identification of Dhanika with the Dhanika Paṇḍita to whose son, Vasantācārya, a land grant was made by Muñja in A.D. 974. Dhanika quotes stanzas of his own in Sanskrit and Prākrit and also a treatise, Kāvyanirṇaya, elsewhere unknown.

Of the fourteenth century in all probability are three works of unequal importance and merit. The Pratāparudrīya of Vidyānātha is a mediocre compilation from the Dāçarūpa and the Kāvyaprakāça of Mammaṭa, covering the whole field of poetics; it illustrates the formal rules of the drama by the composition of a wretched drama in honour of Pratāparudra of Warangal, whose inscriptions show dates from A.D. 1298 to 1314. Of much greater interest is Vidyādhara's Ekāvalī; like Vidyānātha, the author celebrates in his illustrations of his text his patron, in this case Narasiṅha II of Orissa, perhaps A.D. 1280-1314; as a poet his merits are negligible, but he shows a lively interest in his subject and intelligence in his views. Of greater popularity than either