महावीरचरितम् (महाकवि भवभूति - वीररस-प्रधान रामकथा नाटक सम्पूर्ण ७ अङ्क सटीक)

Introduction [lxxvi
compounds would rather show that Bhavabhūti did not care to make the
thing too easily understood. The standards and limits of propriety as well
as of prudery are different for different people, and for different epochs in
the social development of the same people; and since Bhavabhūti was in
this play evidently straining for effect and eager to secure from every
different element of his audience all possible emotional response, any
wholesale condemnation of the poet on this score would be as unfair
as a similar condemnation of certain free passages in Shakespeare's poems
and plays, or of the erotic verse of some of the early Christian writers.¹
The Present Play: Uttara-Rāma-charita
38. Transition to the Uttara-Rāma-charita.—Between the two plays
that we have been hitherto considering and the play before us we must
assume an interval of time sufficient to account for its almost perfect
development in form and technique. The poet himself calls this play
a product of his mature genius.² Presumably therefore in the interval the
poet was acquiring more practice—writing more dramas; but unfortunately
none of these intervening attempts have survived. We have given above
(§ 15) the external evidence that inclines us to assume such lost works;
but were this evidence entirely lacking, it would yet be hard to believe that
the transition from the earlier to the later work—a transition which is no
ess significant than the transition from Love's Labour's Lost to Romeo and
Juliet—was all made without any intermediate steps; and when we
remember that there was no printing in those days and that even the
manuscripts themselves (especially of works not produced for the court and
not patronized by the king) did not command any extensive circulation; and
when we recall further that, even with more favourable conditions, nearly
half the Elizabethan dramatic literature is now almost entirely lost to us,—
we need not wonder at this regrettable loss, nor grow sceptical about the
existence of works other than those that have actually survived the ravages
of human and non-human enemies of letters.
We turn now to a consideration of the present play, which is Bhava-
bhūti's masterpiece and which has earned for him, by a consensus of
opinion among scholars ancient and modern, a position at least equal to

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¹ I would therefore entirely dissent from
    Dr. Gray when, in an otherwise very
    kindly intentioned passage, he says (Vāsa-
    vadattā, introduction, p. 28): ‘There
    are personal descriptions more de-
    tailed than would be desirable in the
    Occidental literature, together with evi-
    dent approval of relations and ideals which
    the less sensual Western mind rightly condemns.’
    The italics are mine.
² Compare U. R. C. vii. 20ᵈ. The allusion is
    purposely veiled.