Genette's terms like prolepsis and analepsis have become lingua franca in narratology. Kaliadasa has utilized the trope of a curse to exonerate the king Dushyanta of his promiscuous nature. In the epic Mahabharata where the issue of Dushyanta and Shakuntala is broached, the latter is more obdurate than the one portrayed in Kalidasa's version. Kalidasa's play Abhijnanshakuntalam is a skeuomorph of the epic story. In the maelstrom of misfortune, abandoned by kith and kins, Shakuntala never yields.