FRIAR Hold thy desperate hand!
Art thou a man? thy form cries out thou art;
Thy tears are womanish, thy wild acts denote
The unreasonable fury of a beast.
Unseemly woman in a seeming man,
And ill-beseeming beast in seeming both,
Thou hast amazed me. By my holy order,
I thought thy disposition better tempered. (3.3.108-115)
Finally the Friar lets rip; the Nurse has got Romeo’s attention (and, it seems, taken the dagger off him) but this is a moment of real crisis and the Friar is afraid for both Romeo’s life and his soul, as he apparently threatens to kill himself in desperation. Desperate, desperation, despair: these are words that suggest suicidal intent, as well as a larger, less specific suggestion of irrationality. And it’s that capacity for reason that the Friar makes his focus: Tybalt and Mercutio have taunted each other, and Romeo, in terms of masculinity, but here the Friar is interested in humanity too. You look like a man, a grown man, but you’re crying like a woman, or a child. (Romeo has earlier reproached himself, following Mercutio’s death, that Juliet’s beauty hath made him effeminate.) And, you are a man, not a beast, and therefore capable of hearing reason, of rational thought, but you’re behaving so wildly, and so unreasonably (compare Hamlet’s ‘beast that wants discourse of reason’) that it doesn’t seem like it; in fact, you seem both man and woman, man and beast, some kind of monstrous hybrid, an ill-beseeming beast in seeming both. (The man/woman, man/beast binaries are pretty conventional here; they’re revisited – of course – in Hamlet, and Hamlet himself, in 1.2, is also very interested in seeming and seemliness.) When the Friar rebukes Romeo for his intemperance, his excess, literally the unbalanced nature of his humours (I thought thy disposition better tempered) is he also reproaching himself, and telling Romeo that Romeo is letting him down, as well as letting down himself? after all, if he has been Romeo’s teacher, mentor, then he’s been one of the temperers of Romeo’s character, punning on the tempering of steel. (In the same sentence in which Romeo has cried out that Juliet’s beauty has made him effeminate, he goes on to say that valour’s steel has been softened in his temper. And there is, we must assume, still a visible blade in the middle of this scene.)
As editors point out, this is the beginning of the longest speech in the play – 51 lines in total. Whether it remains the longest in performance is, of course, another story. More prompt book work will be called for in due course!
