The Lady of the Jewel Necklace & The Lady who Shows her Love. Harsha

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СКАЧАТЬ borrows his plots but expands on them, as he himself says, in the stage director’s voice, at the start of both ‘The Lady of the Jewel Necklace’ and ‘The Lady who Shows her Love’:

      His majesty Shri Harsha has composed a play called ‘The Lady of the Jewel Necklace’/‘The Lady who Shows her Love,’ graced by an unprecedented arrangement of the plot.

      Sylvain Levi criticizes Harsha for stealing his plot(s) from Kali·dasa’s ‘Malavika and Agni·mitra’ (Malavikagni- mitra), though in fact there is a far closer link to Bhasa’s ‘Vasava·datta in a Dream’: where Kali·dasa’s play has much the same plot, but different characters, Bhasa’s has not only the same plot but the same king and queen. Indeed, by these criteria, Harsha even plagiarized himself, taking the plot of ‘The Lady who Shows her Love’ from ‘The Lady of the Jewel Necklace.’ But surely this is the wrong way to think of it. Rather, Harsha was playing new variations on an old theme.

      The particular dramatic form of Harsha’s plays is that of the minor comedy called a natika (the stage director explicitly identifies it as such), and every natika must follow the same general outline: it is a four act play with many female characters, including a heroine (of royal birth) who is in love with the king and a queen who gives her consent in the end. Its principal mood should be erotic. It most closely corresponds to a romantic comedy in the English theatrical tradition. (The play within a play in ‘The Lady who Shows ________

      her Love,’ by contrast, is identified by all the characters in the play as a nataka, a major drama.)

      Even Levi grudgingly admits that Harsha introduced into the inherited plot a number of original touches: the parrot, the disguise of the maid, the king’s playacting, and so forth. It seems to me (and I will argue below) that he also introduced major meditations on self-imitation and artistic representation. The two plays together constitute a kind of variorum edition of the tale with its variants, or, to change the metaphor, a Bach fugue: they go along together for a while on the same path, with the same characters sometimes saying a line that you recognize from the other play, then they part for a while, then meet and part again.

      Was the audience in on it from the start, because they knew the story from the earlier sources? Or is it like a murder mystery in which we’re in suspense—What was the seer’s prediction? Why is Sagarika in disguise?—until Yau- gandharayana explains it all at the end? I think the former situation is far more likely than the latter. James Thurber (1942) wrote a satirical essay called ‘The Macbeth Murder Mystery,’ in which he imagines a woman who doesn’t know the plot of Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’ but is addicted to murder mysteries, seeing the play for the first time and wondering all through who did it. We would be just as foolish as she was, if we were to assume that Harsha’s audiences expected a surprise. The story of Udayana and Vasava·datta was already a myth in Harsha’s day, and originality is not an essential ingredient of a good myth. The voice of myth is predictable, one that the storyteller knows and the audience expects. The audience has an expectation of what the story _________________

      should say, and the storyteller imitates that paradigm, fulfills that expectation; the audience takes pleasure in predicting what will happen, and satisfaction in seeing it happen, rather than in being surprised or shocked.

      In addition to the general convention of the well-known Indian tale of Udayana and Vasava·datta, ‘The Lady of the Jewel Necklace’ also follows the cross-cultural convention of what literary critics call the recognition narrative, the ultimate revelation of the identity of someone who has been in disguise for much of the story. The recognition narrative served, like the theme of the Pietà or the Madonna and Child for medieval European sculptors, as a classical, shared theme that challenged the artist to use it as a foil for individual originality—for tellers of myths can, in fact, be highly original, as long as they also take pains to touch all the bases that their audiences expect. The recognition scene in narratives is a cliche, which has led literary critics and cultural snobs (two often intersecting groups) commonly to regard such stories with contempt and suspicion. But the audience enjoys the way that, as the story unfolds, we see through the disguise of the new superficial details—a different character, a different country—to realize that it is, in fact, our old friend the finally revealed heroine. When the victim in a masquerade narrative finally recognizes the masquerader (“Oh, it’s the princess!”), the reader or listener of the story recognizes the plot (“Oh, it’s a recognition story!”). And it is precisely this known quality of the cliche plot (plus its intrinsic appeal: cliches endure because they represent truths) that makes it ultimately fulfilling. The moment when the two apparently different characters are revealed to be two ________

      aspects of one person brings with it the same satisfaction as the moment when the last piece of the jigsaw puzzle—or the last line connecting the dots—slips in to reveal the total image, or when, in a piece of classical music, the expected final sequence of chords comes into resolution. This accounts for the extraordinary popularity of recognition scenes in all types of literature, a popularity that remains in tension with the contempt of the critics.

      Self-impersonation¹

      Several characters in the two plays by Harsha accidentally (or, occasionally, purposefully) imitate themselves, and in both plays, the double disguise frees another self. In ‘The Lady who Shows her Love,’ Udayana-as-Mano·rama-as-Udayana is able to make love to his new woman—Priya·darshika-as-Aranyika-as-Vasava·datta—under the eyes of his queen and get away with it, as he fails to do in his own persona, the king-as-the-king. And in ‘The Lady of the Jewel Necklace,’ it is only when the queen inadvertently masquerades as her rival, the queen-as-Ratnavali-as-Sagarika-as-the-queen, that the truth comes out, first in the king’s words and then in Vasava·datta’s honest expression of her hurt and her anger.

      Udayana’s impersonation of Udayana in ‘The Lady who Shows her Love’ is the most explicit instance of self-impersonation, but in ‘The Lady of the Jewel Necklace,’ the queen says of him, when he behaves in a characteristically adulterous manner, “My husband, this is worthy of you; it’s just like you.” The word she uses, sadrsam, more specifically refers to something that looks just like some- ________

      thing else. She means that he is true to type, but she says that he gives the appearance of being himself. His ultimate resemblance will be not to himself but to his son: Vasu·bhuti greets Vasava·datta, in Act Four of ‘The Lady of the Jewel Necklace,’ by saying, “Live long and prosper, and may you have a son just like the king of Vatsa.” This is the only reminder in either play that the fight between the two women is a matter not merely of sexual jealousy but of succession; and here we may recall that Harsha himself died without an heir.

      There are a number of disguises in the involuted plot of ‘The Lady of the Jewel Necklace’ (Doniger 2005: 29–35). People constantly accuse one another of imagining things to be other than they are, and they are usually right. Ratnavali is disguised as Sagarika before the play begins. She mistakes Udayana for Kama, the god of love (an understandable mistake, since she sees Vasava·datta simultaneously worshipping Kama and Udayana), and she imaginatively represents herself as the king’s lover in the portrait she paints. Then the intentional disguises begin: Ratnavali-as-Sagarika is disguised as Vasava·datta and mistaken for Vasava·datta, and Vasava·datta, not disguised at all, is taken for (Ratnavali-as)-Sagarika-as-Vasava·datta. Vasava· datta begins the masquerade inadvertently when she gives her own clothes to her rival’s friend; but then the reins are taken out of her hands when the clothes are used to deceive her and she unconsciously impersonates Ratnavali-as-Sagarika consciously impersonating her. Through a kind of double-double-cross, in which the king mistakes his queen for the Other Woman, and the Other Woman for the queen, ________

      he actually makes love to Vasava·datta when she is undisguised, thinking she is someone else pretending to be her. He calls her by the wrong name, “Sagarika,” a fatal (and, in Sanskrit literature, conventional) error. СКАЧАТЬ