Читать книгу The Lady of the Jewel Necklace & The Lady who Shows her Love - Harsha - Страница 30

Thus desire and the embrace is assimilated to the themes of the magic curse and artistic creation as forces that reveal true love.

Harsha’s Dramas

We do not know which of the two plays Harsha wrote first. The fact that the speech describing the Spring festival is appropriate to ‘The Lady of the Jewel Necklace’ but is repeated verbatim in ‘The Lady who Shows her Love,’ where it is inappropriate, suggests that Harsha wrote ‘The Lady of the Jewel Necklace’ first and modified it to produce ‘The Lady who Shows her Love.’ ‘The Lady of the Jewel Necklace’ is also considerably longer than ‘The Lady who Shows her Love,’ almost half again as long, and has far more poetry. On the other hand, the puns on priya (“dear” or “what is wanted”) in the final conversation that is duplicated in both plays make far better sense in ‘The Lady who Shows her Love,’ and therefore may have been composed for that play and later transferred to the other. As for the plot itself, the action in ‘The Lady who Shows her Love’ takes place earlier than that of ‘The Lady of the Jewel Necklace,’ for its first act, set a year or so before the rest of the play, tells us how Udayana first met and married Vasava·datta, an event which is regarded as quite recent (so that Vasava·datta is often referred to as a princess, as well as a queen), whereas in ‘The Lady of the Jewel Necklace’ it is never described and is presumably more distant in time. Yet Priya·darshika, but not Ratnavali, mentions Padmavati, the affair with whom took place after Udayana had married Vasava·datta.