Friar Lawrence in Romeo and Juliet
A Character Study of the Ambiguous Monk
Friar Lawrence helps Romeo and Juliet in their plan to marry secretly. But does this ambiguous character have his own agenda?
Friar Lawrence in Romeo and Juliet, who appears at first glance to be just a plot device or at most a slightly sympathetic character, is in fact an ambiguous figure. The Friar helps Romeo and Juliet’s romance by marrying them in secret, and later providing Juliet with a drug which give her the appearance of death, and thus avoid having to marry Paris. He is not just a useful minion to their love, like the Nurse. Friar Lawrence may have his own agenda.
When he first appears, the morning after Romeo and Juliet met, Friar Lawrence greets the dawn with a speech about herbs and drugs, expanding on the Renaissance commonplace that there everything in the world has its proper purpose and virtue, but that there is “Naught so good but, strained from that fair use/ Revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse” (II.2). He meditates upon a plant in which “Poison hath residence, and medicine power”. In the Baz Luhrman film Romeo and Juliet, Pete Postlethwaite’s Friar Lawrence was drawing a scalpel across an opium poppy as he delivered these lines.
Obviously this moralitas literally applies to the drug that he will provide for Juliet, as well as the poison Romeo takes to kill himself. However, it also surely reflects upon the romance around which the play centres, though the Friar’s meaning is dubious. Does he mean that love is noble when it is freely given, but unworthy when it is used as the tool of politics and alliances, as modern audiences might assume? Or does he rather mean that lawful married love is virtuous, and, (as Brooke’s prose tale, one of the previous version of Romeo and Juliet puts it) that it becomes sinful when undertaken for “unhonest desires” amidst the “shame of stol’n contracts”?
After all, Friar Lawrence does not immediately approve of Romeo’s plan to marry Juliet, and asks him “Is Rosaline, that thou didst love so dear,/ So soon forsaken?” Romeo’s arguments in favour of his current love are hardly very creditable: “Her I love now/ Does grace for grace, and love for love allow/ The other did not.” This is dangerously close to saying that Juliet’s easy enough to make it worthwhile. Friar Lawrence doesn’t agree to help them because he is convinced by Romeo’s sincerity, but for a specific reason (“in one respect”, as he says), namely that “This alliance may so happy prove/ To turn your households’ rancour to pure love.” (II.2)
Looked at closely, then, Friar Lawrence might be accused of helping to arrange Romeo and Juliet’s marriage for reasons that have nothing to do with their love. Though he wants to create peace, he is arguably as keen to use marriage for the purposes of “alliance” as Old Capulet is when he tries to make Juliet marry Paris.
