Skip to main content

How does this speech about the dangers of herbs foreshadow the end of Romeo and Juliet?

Act II, Scene III opens in Friar Laurence's cell, or private living space. He is holding a basket and speaks to himself about some of the plants he tends to and will gather. He remarks that many flowers have "virtues" (medicinal benefits) but that there can be a fine line between medicine and poison. Some plants are poisonous altogether, even those with a pleasant flower, sweet smell, or good flavor. If one abuses, or makes a vice of, those plants with medicinal properties, they might accidentally poison themselves and die. 


Friar Laurence's speech foreshadows the events of the second half of the play by informing us of the good and bad qualities of plants. When Romeo is banished from Verona for killing Tybalt, he and Friar Laurence concoct a plan that will allow Juliet to escape with him. In Act IV, Scene I, the Friar gives Juliet a little bottle of a sleeping potion which is so strong it will make her appear dead for almost two full days. She is to drink the potion to convince her family that she is dead and be placed in the family tomb, where Romeo will come to steal her away once she wakes up. Here we see one of the virtues of plants- bringing sleep.


If Balthasar had not wrongly informed Romeo that Juliet is dead (Act V, Scene I), and instead received the truth from Friar Laurence, all might have gone according to plan. Juliet did awake to find Romeo in the tomb with her, but he had already taken advantage of the other sort of qualities plants provide- poison. Romeo purchased a little bottle of strong poison from an Apothecary, someone who prepares plants as a profession, and has committed suicide so that he may lie with Juliet in eternity.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Is there a word/phrase for "unperformant"?

As a software engineer, I need to sometimes describe a piece of code as something that lacks performance or was not written with performance in mind. Example: This kind of coding style leads to unmaintainable and unperformant code. Based on my Google searches, this isn't a real word. What is the correct way to describe this? EDIT My usage of "performance" here is in regard to speed and efficiency. For example, the better the performance of code the faster the application runs. My question and example target the negative definition, which is in reference to preventing inefficient coding practices. Answer This kind of coding style leads to unmaintainable and unperformant code. In my opinion, reads more easily as: This coding style leads to unmaintainable and poorly performing code. The key to well-written documentation and reports lies in ease of understanding. Adding poorly understood words such as performant decreases that ease. In addressing the use of such a poorly ...
Post a Comment
Read more

A man has a garden measuring 84 meters by 56 meters. He divides it into the minimum number of square plots. What is the length of the square plots?

We wish to divide this man's garden into the minimum number of square plots possible. A square has all four sides with the same length.Our garden is a rectangle, so the answer is clearly not 1 square plot. If we choose the wrong length for our squares, we may end up with missing holes or we may not be able to fit our squares inside the garden. So we have 84 meters in one direction and 56 meters in the other direction. When we start dividing the garden in square plots, we are "filling" those lengths in their respective directions. At each direction, there must be an integer number of squares (otherwise, we get holes or we leave the garden), so that all the square plots fill up the garden nicely. Thus, our job here is to find the greatest common divisor of 84 and 56. For this, we prime factor both of them: `56 = 2*2*2*7` `84 = 2*2*3*7` We can see that the prime factors and multiplicities in common are `2*2*7 = 28` . This is the desired length of the square plots. If you wi...
Post a Comment
Read more