Enter FRIAR [LAWRENCE] alone, with a basket.

FRIAR              The grey-eyed morn smiles on the frowning night,

                        Check’ring the eastern clouds with streaks of light;

                        And fleckled darkness like a drunkard reels

                        From forth day’s path and Titan’s fiery wheels:

                        Now ere the sun advance his burning eye,

                        The day to cheer, and night’s dank dew to dry,

                        I must upfill this osier cage of ours

                        With baleful weeds and precious-juicèd flowers. (2.3.1-8)

The stage direction is mostly editorial, as is the scene division – and indeed the assignation of the beginning of this speech to the Friar: in some editions, following Q2, the first four lines here are given to Romeo, before his final couplet announcing his intention to visit the Friar. Either can be justified; I think I prefer this version, giving the lines to the Friar) because otherwise they slow down the end of the previous scene, and (as other editors point out) disrupt the symmetry of Romeo responding to Juliet’s final couplet with his own couplet, followed by a second announcing his intentions. So what does this achieve, as the opening of this new scene? In some ways, it allows the lyricism of the balcony scene to percolate out, in a kind of pathetic fallacy (albeit this is quite a conventional description of the dawn). The night hasn’t been frowning, though, and by the same token the evocation of the sunrise is not straightforwardly positive: the chariot of the sun has fiery wheels (anticipating Juliet’s later speech) and the sun’s eye burns. The Friar has a way with words (check’ring, fleckled, as well as all his epithets, and his alliteration, and it’s not a basket, it’s an osier cage, made out of willow) and this creates a sympathy with Romeo: if Romeo has the soul of a poet, then perhaps this is one of the people who has nurtured it. The idea of darkness reeling away like a drunkard is lovely; perhaps it also both recalls and anticipates Romeo, who is (as we will shortly see) drunk on love and lack of sleep. (And the Friar is not unworldly; difficult to go past the wonderful Pete Postlethwaite here.) Despite telling us that he has a job to do, and under some time pressure (he needs to gather his plants before the dew on them has dried, a common stipulation in relation to the use of herbs for medicinal purposes), the Friar is about to get side-tracked into a long disquisition on the God-given virtues of plants. Is it over-thinking it to see a propensity to not quite following through as a useful character note? Probably. What about the opposition between precious-juicèd flowers and baleful weeds as a way of conceiving the relationship between Romeo and Juliet and their families? Maybe.