Page:The Sanskrit Drama.djvu/314

Rh in Vatsa's numerous amours. The woman who is common to all (sādhāraṇī) is a courtesan, skilled in the arts, bold, and cunning; she accepts as lovers the rich, the foolish, the self-willed, the selfish, and the impotent so long as their money lasts, then she has them turned out of doors by her mother, who acts as go-between. If she is a heroine, she must be represented as in love, like Vasantasenā in the Mṛcchakaṭikā, except in a Prahasana or farce, where she can be depicted as fleecing her lovers for comic effect; she must not figure as a heroine if the hero is divine or royal.

The heroine may occupy eight different relations to her lover. She may be his absolute mistress (svādhinapatikā), and he her obedient slave; she may be awaiting him in full dress (vāsakasajjā); she may be distressed by his involuntary absence (virahotkaṇṭhitā), enraged (khaṇḍitā) at discovering him disfigured by the marks of her rival's teeth and nails, or be severed from her beloved by a quarrel (kalahāntaritā) and suffer remorse, or be deceived (vipralabdhā) by a lover who fails to meet her at the rendezvous which she has named. Her lover may be absent abroad (proṣitapriyā), or she may have to seek him out or press him to come to her (abhisārikā), giving as meeting-place a ruined temple, a garden, the house of a go-between, a cemetery, the bank of a stream, or in general any dark place. The first two classes of heroine are bright and gay, the others are wearied, tearful, changing colour, sighing, and wear no ornaments as token of their dejection. A woman, who is subject to another, cannot stand in all these relations to a lover; she may be distressed at his absence, deceived, or driven to seek him out, but she cannot be enraged, for she is not the mistress of her lover, and thus the king's courtesy to Mālavikā in Kālidāsa's play is not to be treated as an effort to appease an enraged heroine.

The heroine is accorded even a more generous allowance of excellencies than the hero. The first three are physical, the first display of emotion in a nature previously exempt (bhāva), the movement of eyes and brows betokening the awakening of love (hāva), and the still more open manifestation of affection. The next seven are inherent characteristics of the heroine; the brilliance of youth and passion; the added touch of loveliness