Note 104 — III DRAMATIC THEORY XIII THE THEORY OF THE DRAMATIC ART

The Nāṭyaçāstra104 adds an account of four ornaments of the drama (nāṭakālaṁkāra), which the Daçarūpa ignores, doubtless for the adequate reason that these matters appertain to poetics in general, and they are treated of in vast detail by the text-books of that science. The first is simile, defined as a comparison based on the similarity of characteristics in two objects; there are five kinds, the simile which extols, that which condemns, that with an imagined thing, as when the elephant is likened to a winged mountain, that based on similarity, and that on partial similarity, as in ‘Her face is like the full moon, her eyes like the blue lotus’. The metaphor is an abridged comparison which unites the two objects so as to efface their distinction, as ‘The fisher Love casts on the ocean of this world his lure, woman’. The illuminator (dīpaka) is the figure of speech, which uses but one verb to express the connexion between a subject series and a string of qualifications. Of forms of alliteration (yamaka), the repetition of vowels and consonants forming different words and meanings, there are enumerated ten kinds, a striking proof of the importance attached to these verbal jingles in early poetics.