3
66
PREFACE
“A play attains artistic perfection just in proportion as it approaches that unity of lyrical effect, as if a sony or ballad were still lying at the root of it, all the various expression of the conflict of character and circumstance calling at last into the compass of a single melody or musical theme." - Walter Pater.
What Pater, the profound critic and the master of an inimitable English prose style, has said in the above extract taken from his es- say on 'Shakespeare's English Kings' applies closely to the Sakuntala the famous drama of the Sanscrit poet Kalidasa. The theme of the drama is that which, with all the lyrical charm, treats of the deep love that had sprung between Sakuntala who lived in the hermitage of her foster-father removed far away from the busy haunts of men and the king Dushyanta who accidentally visited her there while he was on a hunting campaign in the forests at the foot of the Himalayas. The plot of the drama is not variegated, as in the comedies of Shakespeare by any artistically inwoven under plots, but is extremely simple and by means of the passionate love-songs that appear all through and by its easily comprehensible unity produces in effect markedly lyrical. Nev- ertheless, the interest of the plot rises at the point where the poet complicates the situation by skilfully introducing into it the curse of the sage Durvasa and making it appear for a time as if the unity had been broken by that unforeseen circumstance and by the conflict of character exhibited between an innocent young woman absorbed in her recent love experience and the easily irritated sage who had sud- denly appeared before her. Still the lyrical unity runs clearly through the succeeding events by the interest of the plot being attached anew to the loss and recovery of the ring which the king put on the finger of
