Friar Lawrence Clergyman

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Friar Lawrence: Kind Clergyman, or Killer? Known throughout the world as the play that spawned the widely known “star-crossed lovers” archetype, William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy in which title characters Romeo and Juliet fall infatuated with each other. Unfortunately, they belong to two different noble houses warring against each other in a 1500’s Verona, Italy; Romeo is of the Montague house, and Juliet is of the Capulet house, meaning that they cannot get married, but this does not stop them. Eventually, their infatuation leads them to their doom, where they are both killed by instances of suicide, thus the keyword “tragedy.” However, while they may be physically responsible in taking their own lives, Friar Lawrence,…show more content…
Lawrence conceived their marriage in an effort to end the conflict between the lovers’ noble houses, but his own fixation in stopping the warring led him to marry an immature couple whose naiveté he even acknowledges, not knowing the repercussions, which makes him responsible for allowing the incident to begin. According to a study done by Ted Huston, “happily married couples dated for approximately 25 months before getting married,” (“eHarmony”), but Romeo and Juliet barely waited a day. Even Lawrence knows that their relationship is too young for marriage when he says, “These violent delights have violent ends," (pg. 159), but this is only an afterthought as he agrees to marry them before these doubts when he says, “...I’ll thy assistant be; for this alliance may so happy prove to turn your households’ rancour to pure love,” (pg. 126). Imagine what a parent would say if their child came home one day and said, “Hey mom, I married the guy I met today! He’s really cute.” In the case of Romeo and Juliet, the marriage would be seen as an insult so great - marrying the son/daughter of your worst enemy - that only further conflict would come from it, and Lawrence authorizes this. Instead of approaching the houses to talk of Romeo and Juliet’s relationship to each other, he goes ahead and marries them off, and his shortsightedness there starts the lovers down the path to their
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