#shakespunk

this is a bit of an inside joke but is hopefully still funny:

@giuliettaluce replied to your post: Friar Lawrence was the action of a peacemaker, while Benvolio was only in words (the part of when he interfered the servants in a sword-fight at the beginning), Lawrence took the action and did it with good intentions. Although it didn’t work at the end, I take Friar Lawrence as a man who only wishes the end of a war and to save the last souls of two warring families.

@letsgetabsurd replied to your post: my lit teacher at school said that technically Friar Lawrence was to blame not because he married them in secret and so on, but because he was incompetent profession-wise: he should have known that Death always takes what was promised and Death shouldn’t be fooled around with (Juliet tricking everyone that she was dead) Though I haven’t given him much thought since that so I don’t really have my own solid opinion. I’d like to know your thoughts about him

@the-princess-of-pirates replied to your post: He had the best in mind when he started but instead he helped solicit a death march of at least four children/young adults. Misguided hope.

Thank you guys so much for sharing your thoughts with me! What you said is really interesting, and here’s how I feel about him:

I think Friar Lawrence is an enigmatic character with a really intense development through the story. He is wise and ignorant, confident and appalled at the same time. His speeches are excessively long, filled with monotony and homiletic expressions. It’s ironic that he criticizes Romeo’s ‘love’ for Rosaline because it ‘did read by rote, that could not spell’, when his own language is limited to received verbal conventions and incessant rhymes. For instance, I always thought that his first speech contrasted entirely with the vivid poetry that Romeo and Juliet had shared only a few seconds ago in the balcony scene. He spends a huge amount of time giving advices to the lovers, especially Romeo, constantly using commonplace expressions. Both R and J rely on his wisdom, his ‘long-experienced time’, and his ‘art’ to find a solution to their problems. Indeed, he knows what people should do—he knows what his books say people should do. But when it comes to putting his own advices into practice, he fails chaotically just like everyone else. Zeffirelli made him trip and almost fall down when he warned Romeo, ‘Wisely and slow; they stumble that run fast.’ Romeo couldn’t help laughing.

I’ve been trying to find a text post which suggested that all the Friar had to do, after Lord Capulet sold Juliet to Paris (because that’s what he did), was simply say the truth to the Prince. I can’t seem to find the post again, but credits to OP! I thought this was very interesting, and I think the fact that he opted to fake Juliet’s death might prove how scared he is himself. Perhaps he is afraid of the consequences of having married Romeo and Juliet without the consent of those two violent, uncontrolled families that keep murdering people for the slightest of reasons. I think the Friar is just that—an old man who has been living inside his books and among plants all his life, who knows really well how things should be, but who underneath all the received knowledge has a trembling heart and a panicked mind. ‘So smile the heavens upon this holy act,’ he says in the wedding scene, ‘That after-hours with sorrow chide us not.’ He is also full of foreshadowing, just like the lovers. In Zeffirelli’s movie, he is about to stop Juliet from leaving his cell with the potion. He reaches his arm toward her, his mouth about to pronounce the first syllable of her name… but then he lets her go. He covers his mouth with his hand and closes his eyes frustratingly. In Luhrmann’s version, we see him fret and sweat as he waits for the time of Juliet’s awakening to come. He is desperate and vulnerable and not at all the long-experienced man whose ‘art’ could prevent any tragic outcome. The ferocity of the feud is more potent than any kind of wisdom—it prompts even the wise to make bad choices. ’Fear comes upon me,’ he says, ‘O, much I fear some ill unlucky thing!’ This turns him into a very interesting and pitiful character to me, because he is just as lost as Romeo and Juliet. The philosophy, the 'adversity’s sweet milk’ that he mentioned in 3.3 becomes completely useless. I think fear, more than irresponsibility or unconcern, is what makes him leave the tomb after Juliet’s awakening. He quickly comes up with a new plan for her: a convent, something that she rejects entirely. But then he is overcome with fear again: ’I dare no longer stay’. (I love how Zeffirelli made him scream these words over and over again as he ran outside the vault.) Away from his plants and books, he is devastated, drowned in despair, exposed. He has experienced the horrors of Verona and discovered that life is not as simple as his advices presumed, that things like dread and impotency can be really harmful. To me, one of the most heartbreaking lines of the play is what the Third Watchman says: 'Here is a friar that trembles, sighs, and weeps.’ And weeps. The Friar is crying. Perhaps he has realized that his books did not encompass the entirety of human passions. He had warned Romeo that 'they stumble that run fast’, but in the tomb scene he said, 'How oft tonight / Have my old feet stumbled at graves.’ Kenneth Branagh’s 2016 production made him fall on the floor overcome with tears after he delivered his last speech, and not even the Prince’s absolution seemed to have any effect on him.

So I agree with you—his intentions were good, but his handling of the situation was not. I’m really fond of characters who start out as confident and determined, but who are tragically, poetically defeated by chaos. I think expressions like 'I dare no longer stay’ or 'Fear comes upon me’ are really intriguing, coming from a character as resourceful as him and who seemed to be immune to imprudence. There are, on the other hand, other factors that thwarted his plans: namely plague. That’s what didn’t let Friar John deliver the letter to Mantua, and Shakespeare’s audience wouldn’t have found it odd that plague would ruin someone’s life. However, I don’t like reading the play as an unfortunate accident, though you can definitely interpret it like that if you want. I don’t think the real tragedy is caused by Friar John failing to send the letter or Romeo not waiting five more minutes to kill himself. I’m not actually sure Romeo and Juliet would have had their happy ending if they had escaped to Mantua. The Capulets were already planning to poison Romeo. (And, moreover, I think the essence of the play is the restoration of Verona and the triumph of love over hate. It would have been bittersweet to me if Romeo and Juliet had simply run away to another place, escaping from an endless chaos that would have never found a solution. I think the story is Verona’s society itself, and if the lovers had left it behind it would have become sort of pointless. Verona had to destroy Romeo and Juliet and their own destruction had to restore Verona in return.)

I like to compare Arthur Brooke’s prologue to his poem with that of Shakespeare. Both are sonnets and both give away the ending of the story. But Brooke elaborates on how they die:

Love hath inflamed twain by sudden sight, And both do grant the thing that both desire They wed in shrift by counsel of a friar. Young Romeus climbs fair Juliet’s bower by night. Three months he doth enjoy his chief delight. By Tybalt’s rage provoked unto ire, He payeth death to Tybalt for his hire. A banished man he 'scapes by secret flight. New marriage is offered to his wife. She drinks a drink that seems to reave her breath: They bury her that sleeping yet hath life. Her husband hears the tidings of her death. He drinks his bane. And she with Romeus’ knife, When she awakes, herself, alas! she slay'th.

Shakespeare, on the contrary, focuses on why they die. His prologue informs us of the violence of 'fair Verona’, and the 'death-marked love’ that ceased it. So what’s important is not so much how things happen but why. I tend to think of the sleeping potion as a device to situate Juliet in her grave, her 'wedding bed’, ergo allowing both lovers to react to each other’s death by consciously choosing death over life, which turns out to be the only way they have to claim their rejection of the feud. We can partly blame Juliet and Friar Lawrence and their death-faking plan, Friar John and his inability to deliver the letter, Romeo and his impetuous suicide, Balthazar and his too effective service to Romeo, etc. But I think it’s quite unfair, because none of them wished to do any harm. The Friar and Juliet were desperate and scared and Romeo had to 'shake the yoke of inauspicious stars / From this world-wearied flesh’ after the death of the only person who assured that his real identity did not depend on the Montague surname. To me, Romeo and Juliet’s death was not a mistake caused by the Friar’s undelivered letter, but rather it was R and J’s deliberate, individual choice because they could not stand the oppression of their environment. I think that’s more tragic than an accident and more complex than a mistake made by someone as excusably desperate as the Friar. Basically I love everyone and can’t blame them for anything.

I don’t think there’s any information about what’s going on in Messaline during the events of Twelfth Night. In fact, it’s only in Act 5 and the reunion of the twins that you find out they're from Messaline, and it’s a place invented by Shakespeare (unlike Illyria) so it probably doesn’t really matter.

Ahhh thanks for asking!! ☺

My favorite sonnet is SONNET CXXI

"'Tis better to be vile than vile esteem'd,

When not to be receives reproach of being,

And the just pleasure lost which is so deem'd

Not by our feeling but by others' seeing:

For why should others false adulterate eyes

Give salutation to my sportive blood?

Or on my frailties why are frailer spies,

Which in their wills count bad what I think good?

No, I am that I am, and they that level

At my abuses reckon up their own:

I may be straight, though they themselves be bevel;

By their rank thoughts my deeds must not be shown;

Unless this general evil they maintain,

All men are bad, and in their badness reign."

My favorite line is "We know what we are but not what we may be" that or "What, you egg"

I do! I do love her… until the fourth act.

I love the archetype of a bawdy, comical middle-aged woman that actually has personality, mainly because older women are seldom important in books. But Romeo and Juliet wouldn’t really be the same without the Nurse. What’s even better is that her role is not limited to helping Juliet with her secret marriage—she is also funny, she has a lot of lines that were written just to make the audience enjoy themselves, and that’s wonderful and hard to find in literature.

Of course I love how tender the Nurse and Juliet’s relationship is. In many ways, she is Juliet’s real mother. “Faith, I can tell her age unto an hour,” she assures. She knows Juliet. She’s been there for her all her life. She remembers everything. And, most of all, I love how protective she is. The first thing she tells Romeo is that he shouldn’t be cruel to her: “but first let me tell ye, if ye should lead her into a fool’s paradise, as they say, it were a very gross kind of behavior, as they say: for the gentlewoman is young; and, therefore, if you should deal doublewith her, truly it were an ill thing to be offered to any gentlewoman, and very weak dealing.”

And then she stands up for Juliet when Capulet harasses her. I’m really fond of the following lines:

NURSE: God in heaven bless her!You are to blame, my lord, to rate her so.CAPULET: And why, my lady wisdom? hold your tongue,Good prudence; smatter with your gossips, go.NURSE: I speak no treason.CAPULET: O, God ye god-den.NURSE: May not one speak?

May not one speak? That’s such a powerful line.

However, what is so hard for me to accept is her turning her back on Juliet. “I think it best you married with the county”—it’s like she is saying, “do what they say, give up on yourself.” She then proceeds to praise Paris’ physical beauty in a really superficial fashion, as if that should be enough to satisfy Juliet. What’s even more disturbing to me is her quite graphic description of Juliet and Paris’ wedding night:

Sleep for a week; for the next night, I warrant,The County Paris hath set up his rest,That you shall rest but little.

Although she now believes Juliet to be willing to marry him, I, as a reader who knows Juliet’s real state of mind, tremble at what the Nurse’s words illustrate here. She had already made some inconvenient comments at the friar’s cell, when she urged Romeo to “stand, stand an you be a man / […] rise and stand; / Why should you fall into so deep an O?”. There’s a sexual innuendo in those lines that I find out of place again. I feel like while the tragic side of the story takes over the first comic acts, so does the Nurse’s character develop from entertaining to betraying.

She makes Juliet feel even more isolated (“Go, counsellor; / Thou and my bosom henceforth shall be twain”). She is scared and terrified and she would like to have someone by her side, but she knows she no longer can count on the Nurse:

I have a faint cold fear thrills through my veins,That almost freezes up the heat of life:I’ll call them back again to comfort me:Nurse! What should she do here?My dismal scene I needs must act alone. 

You could argue that she advised Juliet to obey her father precisely because she loved her, because at that point it was the safest thing to do. But I can’t help looking at it like a submission—like an acceptance of patriarchal norms. Perhaps being exposed to Capulet’s fury reminded her of how fragile her situation is in the family. After all, she hardly ever dared use the familiar pronoun ‘thou’ with Juliet. She never seemed to forget that she was only a servant. Looking at the way she tried to convince Juliet that Romeo wasn’t worth it and that Paris would make her happier, perhaps she realized the serious injuries she inflicted on Capulet by helping his only daughter marry Montague’s son and so she attempts to mend it. (It’s interesting to note that in Shakespeare’s source, the Nurse is banished from Verona after Juliet and Romeo’s death, although Shakespeare left that up in the air and simply said that “some shall be pardoned and some punished.”)

My thoughts on this subject are far from simple, because it’s a question that’s tied up with my understanding of the play as a whole and with the way the play presents desire.

The first thing to note is that Shakespeare takes great pains to establish just how alike the twins are. Viola’s identity is strongly bound up in Sebastian (which I believe has to do with the metaphysics of twinship). When she arrives on the coast of Illyria, Viola has no idea what her life is worth anymore: ‘And what should I do in Illyria? / My brother he is in Elysium’ (1.2.2-3), and although it isn’t clear from the beginning, Viola later makes it clear that her disguise as ‘Cesario’ is based on her brother Sebastian:

I my brother knowYet living in my glass. Even such and soIn favour was my brother, and he wentStill in this fashion, colour, ornament,For him I imitate. (3.3.346-50)

Viola actively copies her brother in manner and in dress, right down to the details. So ‘Cesario’ lies somewhere in between ‘Viola’ and ‘Sebastian’, it’s not a straightforward persona of Viola, and this is reaffirmed by Sebastian when he finally comes face-to-face with Viola

Do I stand there? I never had a brother,Nor can there be that deity in my natureOf here and everywhere. (5.1.224-6)

He recognises this other creature as an ‘I’, as himself. His closeness and his paired identity with Viola is confirmed at the end, when Sebastian says to Olivia ‘You are betrothed both to a man and maid’ (5.1.257), which, on a literal level means that she’s married to a virgin male, but suggests that in marrying Sebastian, Olivia marries someone who is at least partly Viola himself.

Having said that, the ending isn’t necessarily comfortable, because it doesn’t resolve all of the sexual confusion that the play has raised. One way of viewing the paring off at the end is to say that the play affirms a sense of heteronormativity, some critics would even say that the play positions same-sex desire as a narcissistic phase that the characters overcome at the end. Another way of reading it is that the play reasserts dramatic conventions to impose an ending onto an otherwise complicated plot.

But Shakespeare is never so uncomplicated. I always think that any sense of discord or discomfort at the end is deliberate, especially considering how Shakespeare’s comedies become problem plays later in his life. Just like As You Like It, where the comedic ending is made patently transparent through the use of the Deus ex Machina tradition and the all-too-convenient marriages, I think that the ending of Twelfth Night highlights the artificial nature of comedy endings and how there is no resolution to the complications raised by uncategorizable sexual desire and the fluidity of gender. After all, even heteronormativity is up in the air at the end, where Orsino continues to call Viola ‘boy’ (5.1.261) and says ‘Cesario come – / For so you shall be while you are a man’ (5.1.375-6); suggesting that his love for Cesario isn’t actually dependent on gender.