Then again, writing about completely foreign settings doesn't make Balagtas much different from, say, William Shakespeare, who was famously obsessed with Italy to the point of setting many of his plays there despite having never gone (according to what we know, at least).Īdvertisement: Tropes Appearing in Florante at Laura: He doesn't dwell, though, on whether they stayed Christian or attempted to spread that gospel upon returning to their native (and obviously majority-Muslim) lands. The strongest piece of evidence for this, perhaps, is the fact that Balagtas tacked on a couple of lines at the end of the epic suggesting that the Muslims Aladin and Flerida converted to Christianity.
At the time, The Church (so closely wedded to State in the Spanish Empire) controlled most local media, owning as they did most of the colony's printing presses. It's generally agreed upon that Balagtas wrote about a completely foreign setting and characters as a means to bypass the Censorship Bureau of the colonial regime, which would've likely comprised both government officials and Catholic friars. Of note is the fact that despite being a Filipino work, other than the language (obviously), and the main characters' religions, nothing else is Filipino about the poem.
