Friar Lawrence in Context
Romeo & Juliet and Catholic Stereotypes in the Renaissance
Shakespeare's Friar Lawrence is coloured by prevailing attitudes to Catholicism in Renaissance drama.
Friar Lawrence is usually played as a minor but sympathetic character who helps Romeo and Juliet to marry against the will of their tyrannical parents. However, in the context of English Renaissance attitudes to Catholicism, he is a far more shadowy and questionable character.
It is important to remember that Romeo and Juliet takes place in Italy, an extremely evocative setting for Renaissance Londoners. Italians were stereotypically regarded as devious, prone to quarrelling, lustful and elaborately spoken. It’s easy to see these traits in characters like Mercutio, Tybalt and Romeo. They were also, of course, considered to be heretics, since England was a staunchly Protestant country, and Italy was not only Catholic, but the seat of the Pope. Friar Lawrence is not a genial Anglican vicar, but a member of a monastic order in a foreign religion.
Modern audiences tend to approve of the secret negotiations which lead to Romeo and Juliet being married, but they are in fact used by one of the contemporary prose version of the story as evidence that “auricular confession” leads to plots and subversion. Juliet’s visit to the friar’s cell to make confession is perfectly reasonable and pious to contemporary Catholicism, and modern opinion, but to most English contemporaries it had the dangerous whiff of popery. Though in this case arguably justified by their parents’ feud and Juliet’s arranged engagement, the disruption of proper authority by the influence of Catholic priests was a perennial fear in Protestant countries during the Renaissance.
The marriage of the two lovers is enacted in secret by the Friar, at his “cell.” The celebration of secret masses did occur during the religious persecutions in England, as can be seen from the famous “priest holes” which were built in some houses at the time to hide Catholic clergy. The poet John Donne’s brother was arrested for harbouring a Catholic priest who had performed a secret mass, and it was an issue which induced a McCarthy-like paranoia in the state.
Friar Lawrence’s association with drugs and poisons makes him equally suspect. His first speech points out the distinction between them, and emphasizes his concern for virtue, but Catholicism was still associated in the English imagination with poisoning. This stereotype included figures such as the Borgias, who had been famous Italian poisoners, and even counted Popes amongst the family. This association between Catholics and poison is obvious in other drama of the era, particularly revenge tragedy. Friar Lawrence’s mastery of obscure pharmacology is demonstrated when he supplied Juliet with the drug which allows her to fake her own death.
Friar Lawrence is not a completely sinister character in Romeo and Juliet, but many of the actions he undertakes for what we would think of as laudable purposes have echoes in the stereotyped views about Catholicism amongst English contemporaries. Pete Postlethwaite’s performance (in the Baz Luhrman film Romeo + Juliet) of a muscular, tattooed monk slicing open an opium poppy, catches some of this exotic ambiguity.
