METRICAL ROMANCES IN THE PHILIPPINES
by Dean S. Fansler, Ph.D.
Forty years after the Spaniards had founded a permanent settlement in the Philippine Islands, Cervantes published in Spain the first part of the “Adventures of the Ingenious Gentleman, Don Quixote de la Mancha,” a book that effectually destroyed, among the cultured classes at least, the taste for romances of chivalry. Nearly three hundred years later, when Spain withdrew from the isles of the Pacific, nine-tenths of the books printed in the Filipino dialects were either religious (prayers, saints’ lives, and moral tales) or romantic and fantastic stories of the type ridiculed to death in the peninsula by Cervantes. Until the American occupation brought the freedom of the press to the Philippines, the reading-matter of the natives was largely the reading-matter of the Spaniards of the sixteenth century and earlier. Nor have the last fifteen years accomplished among the masses any decided revolution in literary taste. The literature of modern Spain has had very little effect upon Philippine literature. The most popular single book in the. Islands to-day—the “Pasión,” a fourteen-thousand-line metrical account, in quintillas, of the life and sufferings of Jesus Christ — goes back to a Spanish original of the early seventeenth century. While it is true that the commercial presses in Manila, Iloilo, and Cebú, during the last decade, have been printing many new realistic novels and plays from the pens of young writers, the metrical romance continues to hold its place. The stories of Rodrigo de Villas (the “Cid”), Charlemagne and his Twelve Peers, Bernardo del Carpió, the Seven Lords of Lara, and a number of others based upon early Spanish history and legend, keep appearing in larger and larger yearly editions. The enchanter Freston, who Don Quixote was convinced had carried off his beloved library, must have deposited it in the Philippines.
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