Dance after dance follows, and it is getting late. But another
entertainment is in store for us; and so once more we venture forth
into the night--en route to the village-green.
The Moro-Moro, and the Fireworks.
Here has been hastily erected a large booth, around which hundreds of
natives are standing in an attitude of profound interest. A moro-moro
play is going on. This is a sort of Philippine miracle-play, in which
kings and queens and soldiers, and various persons with Biblical names,
contend together. There is rivalry, ruin, and despair; there is death,
murder, and awful retribution. It is a tumultuous tragedy; in which,
too, are some subtle and refined elements, and a kind of gross humor,
represented by the stage-fool and by the lads that take the female
parts. There is, however, no coarseness; not a suggestion of it.
Love and religious persuasion and devotion mark the greatest number
of moro-moro performances, and while some of the plays are fairly
good,--not judging from too lofty a standpoint,--yet, on the other
hand, it is indeed amusing to note how little in this line, how thin
a texture, pleases the people, bombast and fury, honeyed accents
and unnecessary vicarious suffering, false and flagrant violations
of dramatic art--all alike are viewed with breathless interest,
and applauded, or stoically witnessed as the occasion demands. The
entire play is given in the Tagal language.
The native spectators, indeed, enter into the action of the play with,
as it were, a grim earnest; as if all their mental faculties were
judging complex emotions and nice situations.
Nothing, indeed, in the native character is more remarkable than
its unvarying decorum. Here the happy crowd has been standing for
three hours, agape with delight, drinking in the rude splendors of
tinsel potentates.
Here, too, they would be willing to stand for several hours more;
but it is nearly midnight, and a sudden illumination on the other
side of the square announces that the time for departure is almost
at hand. It is seen that the villagers have constructed a miniature
castle, now ablaze with fire-works. Various designs are traced by the
spreading glow, and scores of rockets shoot into the sky, dropping a
shower of brilliant stars. Ever and anon, at some unusual display,
a murmur of applause rises from the admiring throng. Entranced,
they stay until the last rocket has been drowned in the vast ocean
of Night. Then all leave as silently as they came, and the village
square is soon deserted; while the lamps and lanterns are allowed to
burn till their glow is quenched in the brightness of the morrow's sun.
HISTORY OF COMMERCE IN THE PHILIPPINES.
The Spanish Policy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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