It is no secret that I have a particular interest in the history of the early modern period in England, which has the fascinating – to me, at least – intersection of old herbalist practices, folk healing, and alchemy with what were the beginnings of what became modern medicine, of folk understandings of the natural world with natural philosophy and later natural history.
Although I’ve read and taught William Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” more times that I can readily recall, until I made yet another reading of it just recently I had not sufficiently noted the natural history aspect of Friar Laurence. And the more I mused upon the passage quoted below, the more it struck me that his skills as an herbalist / botanist are truly the element upon which the resolution of the entire play turns.