Although many characters in William Shakespeare’s play, Romeo and Juliet, shared the blame of the newlywed's death, Friar Lawrence was ultimately at fault due to his countless naive and rash attempts at holding their doomed marriage together. The Friar had been the one to marry Romeo and Juliet in secret, provide Juliet with the sleeping elixir, and lastly, in act of cowardice, had left Juliet to her own self imposed death when guards could be heard on their way to the Capulet’s tomb. To start, the Friar had been the one to unwisely marry the couple in secret. Although offering little hesitance at young Romeo’s proposition, Lawrence had quickly agreed, thinking that the marriage between the two feuding houses would somehow force them into setting their differences aside for the sake of the young couple. What Friar Lawrence hadn’t realized was that in order to see this happen, the marriage would have had been made public, otherwise the two families would have no idea that their long held grudges would need to have been let go. As consequence to these actions, Tybalt had slain Mercutio, which in turn led to Romeo being responsible for the revengeful …show more content…
When Juliet had come to Lawrence’s cell under the guise of seeking penance for her blatant refusal of her marriage to Paris, the Friar had offered her an elixir meant to send her into a coma like state in which she would appear dead, if only for a day. The downfall of this had been that the message sent to Mantua explaining this sudden solution had never reached the hands of its recipient, Romeo. Instead, one of Romeo’s men had outsped the message and had instead delivered the news of Juliet’s death, leading Romeo to believe that she was, in fact, dead. This poorly planned scandal was the fault of the Friar’s inability to see that everything went accordingly and that Romeo had been accounted