FRIAR              The earth that’s nature’s mother is her tomb;

                        What is her burying grave, that is her womb;

                        And from her womb children of divers kind

                        We sucking on her natural bosom find:

                        Many for many virtues excellent,

                        None but for some, and yet all different.

                        O mickle is the powerful grace that lies

                        In plants, herbs, stones, and their true qualities:

                        For nought so vile, that on the earth doth live,

                        But to the earth some special good doth give;

                        Nor ought so good but, strained from that fair use,

                        Revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse.

                        Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied,

                        And vice sometime by action dignified. (2.3.9-22)

One of the things that this speech is doing is reinforcing generational difference. The Friar is using rhyming couplets (as do Romeo and Juliet, and the other young ones) but his language has the odd archaic touch (here mickle, meaning much or, in this context, great) – and in the Protestant context of 1590s England, a friar is also associated with a bygone age (this is emphasised by his various Catholic oaths and sayings throughout the play, albeit these are not unexpected in an Italian setting). His couplets are notably sententious, however: he’s setting out a particular moralised, and Christian, account of the natural world. It’s impossible not to be reminded of Capulet’s comment of Juliet, to Paris: Earth hath swallowed all my hopes but she. The tomb/wombrhyme is a familiar and conventional one, not least in Shakespeare (hello, Titus Andronicus– a play which overlaps with Romeo and Julietin more ways than we might like to imagine), but it’s not just a circle of life, in the midst of life we are in death thing: there are clear implications for the play in the juxtaposition of children with the burying grave.

But the Friar is making at least two further points. First, nature– and life itself, by extension – is a good thing; everything (implicitly, everything in creation, because it is made by God) has some positive quality, even if it seems ugly, or dull, or even vile. There’s a teacher speaking here: everyone has a talent; everything has some special good in it, even if it’s hard to find. But there’s a caveat: when something naturally good is employed in ways other than nature – God – intended, then that’s abuse, dangerous corruption (and a kind of blasphemy). Underpinning this speech are ideas about human agency and free will: the created world is beautiful and good but, strained from that fair use, it can become dangerous and destructive. It matters for the plot, of course, that the Friar’s facility in manipulating nature – through the manufacture of drugs from plants – is established very early on. He will look for the best in people and situations – as he does with Romeo and Juliet and their relationship – but he acknowledges that such trust can be misplaced; that things – because of the messiness and fallenness of humanity – can go wrong. Yet vice sometime by action dignified means that there is always hope; nothing is beyond redemption, and even an unpromising quality or situation might be able to be remediated. This speech establishes him as an optimist, but also a realist, and sets that within the frame of a thoughtful, if didactic, faith. And the rationale for his actions later in the play – marrying the lovers, giving Juliet the potion – is established here. He’s not really talking about plants at all; he’s using them to think with…

And, he’s doing it in 14 lines, 4+4+4+2. Not quite a sonnet, but still. Maybe this is where Romeo learned how to reason in sonnet form.