The Garden Ring

Act 2, Scene 2

Friar Laurence

Within the infant rind of this weak flower

Poison hath residence and medicine power:

For this, being smelt, with that part cheers each part;

Being tasted, stays all sense with the heart.

Two such opposèd kings encampt them still

In man as well as herbs, grace and rude will;

A light pink tourmaline set with pomme ruby, the band and setting drawn from armour, Elizabethan dress and hair style.

The Friar’s garden speech opens before anyone else is awake. The Friar is alone among his herbs and Romeo has not arrived yet. The love story has not yet asked him of anything.

The flower in his hand holds both poison and medicine. Not one balanced against the other, but both together in the same stem, impossible to separate. What changes is not the plant but how it’s used: how much, by whom, and when. And this isn’t only true of plants, but of people too. Grace and rude will, the capacity for beauty and the capacity for destruction in the same form at once.

The pink tourmaline is the infant rind. Small, soft, seemingly fragile and the colour of something gorwn up from the earth in the Friar’s garden at dawn. The armour is not protecting the stone from outside but it is the other nature living within the same form. Softness and armour are not in opposition but they are the Friar’s argument made physical. Two things encamped together, neither cancelling the other, both entirely present.

The ruby is the poison side, the rude will. The force that destroys when misapplied. And it is, at the same time, the medicine. The passion that drives Juliet to act, Romeo to climb the orchard wall, the Friar himself to perform the marriage. The same red, meaning two things at once, depending on how it is held.

Then the Friar describes this philosophy and immediately fails to follow it. He agrees to marry Romeo and Juliet that same day, believing he can use the flower well- smell it rather than taste it, turn the love toward healing rather than harm. And he is wrong. The thing he described so clearly in his garden, he cannot control out in the world.

The ring holds both the beauty of that philosophy and the tragedy of its limits. The soft stone that contains more than it shows, the armour that is not defence but nature.