moreover, is a glutton, greedy for money, and, as is to be expected, an inveterate gossip, always on the watch for some fresh bit of news. One of the most curious features of the Sanskrit drama, fostered as it was by the court society of India, which was almost always under the control of brahman priests, is that this figure of a degraded and besotted brahman should be allowed to appear as a typical stage-figure. In an article written some years ago[1] I advanced the theory that such a seeming inconsistency might be due to the fact that the drama had its origin in the religious dances and ceremonies of the common people, who were of course largely non-brahmanic, and was therefore an outgrowth of the many popular religions of India rather than a development of pure brahmanism. In this way the conventional figures, having become in the course of time crystallized into permanent types, were retained when the folk-drama became popular at court, and thus even brahman authors did not hesitate to perpetuate the type, though really derogatory to their class. Other stock characters in the plays are the parasite (viṭa), ministers, Buddhist monks and nuns, servants of the harem, dwarfs, mutes, and the female attendants of the king.
For the technical divisions of a drama and the development of the plot there are carefully elaborated rules, but of the actual scenic arrangement of a play, the manner of producing it, and the Technical Divisions and Arrangement of a Play. assignment of the roles we know comparatively little. Plays seem to have been usually presented at the spring festival. A drama always opens with a nāndī, or benediction, usually addressed to Śiva, for the prosperity of the audience, by the sūtradhāra, or director. This director must have been very accomplished and versatile, for the rules say that among other things he must know music, technical treatises, dialects, the art of managing, works on poetry, rhetoric, acting, industrial arts, metre, astronomy, geography, history, and the genealogies of royal families. He was to have a good memory, and to be honest, intelligent, dignified, and- ↑ The origin of the Vidūṣaka and the employment of this character in the plays of Harṣadeva, in JAOS. 20 (1899), pp. 338–340.
