draft 2

In William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, the character of Friar Lawrence is extremely pivotal to the plot. His dual nature and personality is a key element to the plot, as his twin morals impact the entire outcome of the play. While Friar Lawrence does display two major conflicts throughout the play. The more prominent one would be his choice between if he ought to decide to act morally incorrect but chance saving the city and ending the feud, or if he should choose to remain faithful to his ideals but risk plunging Verona into even more violence and chaos.

In addition to this life threatening decision, Friar Lawrence’s other display of duality lie within his coexisting beliefs in both science and religion, two concepts that are known to frequently contradict each other. However, his opening monologue from Act 2, Scene 3, illustrates something that isn’t contrast—but isn’t collaboration—through the frequent juxtaposition of flowers and morals:

“Within the infant rind of this weak flower,

Poison hath residence and medicine power;

For this, being smelt, with that part cheers each part,

Being tasted, stays all senses with the heart.

Two such opposed kings encamp them still

In man as well as herbs, grace and rude will;” (2.3.23-29)

These frequent displays of comparison between virtues and herbology provides us with an interesting view into the perspective of the friar. While he is a man of the cloth, and a highly respected one at that, he isn’t a traditional priestly figure, one who tries to accept both walks of thought but still has to struggle with the consequences of doing so. He does manage to find parallels between these two schools of thought, but they don’t stop him from being constantly reminded of how he is meant to commit himself to one philosophy regarding life, which in turn causes the dissonance between his two mindsets regarding the situation of the young lovers.

As an actor, I tried to portray his internal conflicts through body language and facial expressions using influence from my own prior experiences and emotions, as well as adding inflections and emphasis to some words when speaking. Due to Shakespeare’s notorious lack of stage blocking in his writings, I used the script to determine how I thought characters would speak and move based on their lines. Because of this, I thought of Friar Lawrence as a character that would not make his uncertainty obvious through his dialogue, and more through his movement and expressions. My way of trying to demonstrate this was where I tried to show that every movement was performed and executed with slow and wise caution, something I tried to contrast to the dynamic and energetic being I envisioned Romeo would be during his rush to beg the Friar to perform the secret marriage. Some of the actions I did were to clasp my hands while speaking, as I associate that motion with elderly wisdom, or to tilt my head as if I were spending a lot of thinking energy on trying to comprehend and determine how to respond to Romeo’s requests. While my partner was not wildly vivid, he was lively enough for me to feel as if I were making a large enough contrast between fast youth and slow age.

Aside from these thoughtful motions, I choose to show his inner clash via my speech. While I didn’t follow the iambic pentameter that Shakespeare wrote in, I decided to place extra emphasis on a few keywords to help the audience take note of the Friar’s more prominent dual beliefs, which, like I believe Shakespeare intended, was meant to be noticeable for the audience so they would associate the character with being at a constant crossroads. This mostly took place during the opening monologue—which we cut down for balance—where I chose to stress certain words based on how they contrasted with other words from the lines before and after. For example, I enunciated the words light and night in, “The grey-ey’d morn smiles on the frowning night,/Check’ring the Eastern clouds with streaks of light,” (2.3.1-2) to bring the contrast of dark and dawn into prominence for the audience to take note of.

In addition, I used my previous experiences and emotions from that situation to influence the way I wanted to show how Friar Lawrence would react. Similar to the story of Romeo and Juliet, I was a bystander to two friends in a relationship that I didn’t necessarily agree with. And like the Friar, I was forced to weight the various positives and negatives that would arise, while also having to choose between two mindsets on what I thought was right. My approach to this event was to try and stay relatively neutral on the emotional front, so as to not distress my friends, and to make decisions that would hopefully benefit everyone involved. However, while I was able to tap into this to influence how I acted the role of Friar Lawrence, it also led to my acting to come off as mostly disinterested and almost completely devoid of emotion at times. This could be partly attributed to performance anxiety, but I believe that it was mostly due to this form of method acting as to why.