closely followed; thus in Act IX the absurd celerity with which the officer of the court obeys the order to bring the mother of Vasantasenā on the scene, and secures the presence of Cārudatta, is precisely on a par with Bhāsa's management of the plot in his dramas. The scenes of violence, in which Vasantasenā is apparently killed and Cārudatta is led to death, are reminiscent of Bhāsa's willingness to present such scenes, but they do not depart from the practice of the later drama as in Bhavabhūti's Mālatīmadhava. The Çakāra and Viṭa are indeed figures of the early stage, but they are taken straight from Bhāsa and prove nothing. The position of the Buddhist monk is more interesting, but here again it is borrowed, though developed, and we find Buddhism respected in Kālidāsa and Harṣa. The arguments based on the apparent similarity with the Greek New Comedy are without value for an early date, for they apply, if they have any value at all, to the Cārudatta of Bhāsa. We are left, therefore, with no more than impressions, and these are quite insufficient to assign any date to the clever hand which recast the Cārudatta and made one of the great plays of the Indian drama.[1]
3. The Mṛcchakaṭikā
The first four acts of the play are a reproduction with slight changes of the Cārudatta of Bhāsa;[2] the very prologue shows the fact in the inexplicable transformation in the speech of the director, who opens in Sanskrit and then changes to Prākrit, while in the Cārudatta he speaks Prākrit only as fits the part of the Vidūṣaka which he is to play. The names are slightly changed; the king's brother-in-law is called Saṁsthānaka, and the thief Çarvilaka. Act I carries the action up to the deposit of the gems by Vasantasenā; Act II relates the generosity of the hetaera to the shampooer who turns monk, and the attack made on him as he leaves her house by a mad elephant, from which Karṇapūraka, a servant of Vasantasenā's, saves him, receiving as reward a cloak which Vasantasenā recognizes as Cārudatta's. In Act III we learn of Çarvilaka's success in stealing the jewels, and the generous resolve of the wife of Cārudatta to give her necklace to
