he has come to exhibit a superior sort of drama to that played by a rival, and asserts that the dearest desire of a player is to satisfy the public and to win back the favour he has lost. Rājaçekhara twice introduces the motive of a competition between actors to win the hand of an actress who has been offered by her father in marriage to the most adept of her suitors. Jayadeva invents a pleasing tale of an actor who won great success and reputation, inducing a comedian of the south to claim his name and steal his renown. The actor in revenge went south, and, striking up a partnership with a singer, won both repute and profit in the courts of the Deccan.
The reputation of actors and actresses was low and unsavoury; they are reputed to live on the price of their wives' honour (jāyājīva, rūpājīva), and Manu imposes only a minor penalty on illicit relations with the wife of an actor on the score of their willingness to hand over their wives to others and profit by their dishonour.[1] The Mahābhāṣya gives equally clear testimony of the lack of chastity among the actresses or their predecessors.[2] The law book of Viṣṇu[3] treats them as Āyogavas, a mixed caste representing the fruit of alliances, improper and undesirable, between Çūdras and the daughters of the Vaiçya; to be an actor or a teacher of the art is ranked as a lesser sin in Baudhāyana.[4] The Kuçīlava is described as a Çūdra, who ought to be banished;[5] his evidence, and indeed that of any actor, is not to be accepted in law,[6] and Brahmins may not accept food offered by an actor,[7] a fact attested by the Sūtradhāra in the prologue to the Mṛcchakaṭikā who can find no one in Ujjayinī to accept his hospitality. Actors again are classed in Manu with wrestlers and boxers. An actress was often, if not necessarily, one of the great army of courtesans; Vasantasenā, the hetaera of the Cārudatta and Mṛcchakaṭikā, is herself skilled in acting, and has in her household maidens learning to act, and Daṇḍin includes lessons in this art in his account of the education of the perfect courtesan in the Daçakumāracarita.
On the other hand, we have traces of a higher side of the
