Who Is to Blame for the Death of Romeo and Juliet Essay Sample

The exhilarating story of Romeo & Juliet, by William Shakespeare, is a story about two young lovers from two different feuding families meet their ultimate demise. People argue to this day about who was to blame for the young lovers' deaths. The two star-crossed lovers, Romeo and Juliet, fall in love at a Capulet party. They later decide that they want to get married and go to the cell of Friar Lawrence to ask him to marry them. He disagrees with the plan because he believed that they were going through their relationship too fast and that it can be dangerous later on. He never does anything about it though because he is thinking ahead and has a plan to help them. They finally get him to go through with the ceremony. Friar Lawrence warns them over and over again throughout the story. Friar Lawrence, even though he disagreed with their relationship, helped them through many struggling times in the story. He helped them so much he built up more and more conflicts and tragedies in their relationship and between people around them. Only hours after Friar marries Romeo and Juliet, Romeo gets into a street fight with Tybalt and kills him. He is then banished to Mantua by the prince. Near the end of the story, Capulet forces Juliet to marry Paris in the next two days. Juliet doesn’t want to marry Paris because she is already married to Romeo. Because of this Friar Lawrence starts thinking of another big plan to help the young lovers. He then comes up with a plan to fake Juliets death and send for Romeo to come to the tomb after the burial ceremony and escape with her to Mantua. Friar Lawrence's plan turns to tragedy when the letter to Romeo is sent and Romeo finds Juliet “dead” in the tomb and kills himself with poison. Friar Lawrence is ultimately responsible for Romeo and Juliet’s deaths because of his habit of overplanning and thinking too far ahead.

Friar Lawrence is responsible for the young lovers death because he comes up with ideas and plans for an event before it even happens and they often don’t work out or fail miserably. In the text Friar Lawrence says to Juliet before she fakes her death, “And I will do it without fear or doubt, To live an unstain'd wife to my sweet love. Thou shalt continue two and forty hours, And then awake as from a pleasant sleep” (Shakespeare Act 4, Scene 1). This shows that Friar Lawrence planned out the entire final scene. Juliet was going to fake her death and Friar was going to send a letter to Romeo that her death was faked. But As we know it ends in tragedy as Romeo doesn’t receive the letter that Juliet's death is a fake and kills himself at her tomb and she wakes up to him dead and kills herself as well. This shows that Friar Lawrence is responsible because he was the one who set up the plan that ended in their deaths and he didn’t even fully execute the plan. All in all, Friar Lawrence is the main reason for Romeo and Juliets death. 

In conclusion, Friar Lawrence is responsible for the deaths of the young lovers because he came up with all the plans and THE plan that caused the deaths of the two lovers and even at times didn’t execute his plans in general. Some people think that Friar Lawrence actually helped Romeo and Juliet more than he caused their deaths. This is false because he helped them through the events throughout their relationship which later on led to the events building up to their deaths. Others also argue that Friar Lawrence wasn’t to blame for their deaths but it was Friar John because he didn’t deliver the letter. That's wrong because Friar Lawrence should have notified Romeo's messenger or talked to Romeo himself instead of sending a letter to Romeo. All in all, Friar Lawrence is ultimately responsible for the two star-crossed lovers' deaths because of his habit of thinking too far ahead, overplanning, and not executing his plans fully.