We’ve spent the last couple of days going over Friar Lawrence’s soliloquy that opens 2.3:

The grey-eyed morn smiles on the frowning night,
Chequering the eastern clouds with streaks of light,
And flecked 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 up-fill this osier cage of ours
With baleful weeds and precious-juiced flowers.
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 herbs, plants, 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 aught so good but strain’d from that fair use
Revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse:
Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied;
And vice sometimes by action dignified.
Within the infant rind of this small flower
Poison hath residence and medicine power:
For this, being smelt, with that part cheers each part;
Being tasted, slays all senses with the heart.
Two such opposed kings encamp them still
In man as well as herbs, grace and rude will;
And where the worser is predominant,
Full soon the canker death eats up that plant.

It is a tricky passage because it’s a model soliloquy in that it:

1. Is spoken with the actor alone on stage;
2. Contains very flowery language; and
3. Waxes philosophical, seemingly having nothing to do with the rest of the play.

We began, though, reviewing a tricky thing that Romeo says in 2.2:

Love goes toward love, as schoolboys from their books,
But love from love, toward school with heavy looks.

This has a lot of material elliptically included, but it shows two motions (lovers toward lovers and schoolboys from school books) that it then reverses. It’s a critical movement for understanding Shakespeare because he often pulls this trick: x to y and y to x.

The movement between good and evil is something prevalent in the whole passage.

Afterward, we went over the project that we’ll be embarking on next week.

We’ll be working on this over the next few weeks.

Homework

• English I Honors: continue working on the act 2 study guide.