Friar Lawrence's plan is for Juliet to evade marriage with Paris by taking a sleeping potion that will make her appear to be dead. Once she is laid in the crypt, she will wake up. At that point, she can be reunited with Romeo, and the two can go to live as a married couple in Mantua.
On one level, it is an ingenious plan. Romeo won't be expected back in Verona because he is exiled, and nobody will miss Juliet because they will all assume she is dead. The couple will be able to live happily in Mantua, where nobody has heard of the feud.
The flaw or drawback in the plan is communication. Because of the plague in Mantua, the messenger can't enter the city to leave the crucial news with Romeo that Juliet is only feigning death. When Romeo hears that she has died, he has no reason not to believe the story is true, and he heads back to Verona, prepared to kill himself. When he sees Juliet appearing dead, he does commit suicide.
The friar's plan was too complex. It would have been better for Juliet simply to have confessed to her father that she was already married—but that would have gotten the friar, who would undoubtedly be expected to confirm the truth of the marriage, into deep trouble.
After Romeo is banished from Verona for murdering Tybalt, Friar Laurence formulates a risky plan in order to reunite Juliet with her husband. Friar Laurence's plan is for Juliet to ingest a powerful sleeping potion that will make her appear dead for forty-two hours. He then plans on sending a messenger to Mantua to inform Romeo of the plan and instructs him to enter Juliet's tomb in order to take her to Mantua with him. Friar Laurence hopes that Romeo will receive the message and arrive at the tomb in less than forty-two hours before Juliet wakes up. The strong points of Friar Laurence's plan concern the convincing nature of the Juliet’s sleep. By appearing to be dead, Juliet will successfully avoid her wedding. This plan also provides Romeo with a way to start a new life with Juliet outside of Verona without suspicions surrounding her disappearance. Despite his clever plan, Friar Laurence fails to account for the fact that Romeo may not receive the letter in time. The plan’s major drawback is that it is entirely too risky. If Romeo does not receive the letter, Juliet will awake in the tomb, which will be extremely traumatic and ruin everything. Tragically, Friar Laurence's worst fears are realized when he discovers that Romeo did not receive the letter and Juliet is still in the tomb.
Friar Laurence wants to bring Romeo and Juliet together as he believes that it will end the long, drawn-out feud between the Montagues and the Capulets. He's also concerned about Juliet's fragile mental state. But as the star-cross'd lovers will never be allowed by their warring families to marry each other, the Friar has to come up with a plan, which he does. He advises Juliet to give the impression that she's going to go through with her wedding to Paris. Then, on the night before her wedding, she's to take a sleeping potion that will make her appear that she's dead. Friar Laurence will then send word to the exiled Romeo in Mantua, and he will come and fetch Juliet when she wakes up in the Capulet family tomb where she's been laid to rest.
Although the plan appears quite ingenious on the face of it, tragically it doesn't succeed. The main problem is that too much is left to chance. First of all, let's look at the sleeping potion. The Friar may be a skilled creator of herbal remedies, but even he can't know for sure how Juliet's health will be affected by the sleeping draught. Also the Friar makes no effort to find out what's happening in Mantua, where Romeo has been exiled after killing Tybalt. Had he done so, he would've known that the city is under quarantine due to the plague, and so the messenger he sent to summon Romeo to Juliet's tomb would not have been able to deliver his crucial message.
While Friar Laurence cannot reasonably be expected to have foreseen what ultimately happens, in his haste to come up with a cunning scheme he displays an astonishing degree of recklessness and lack of foresight, the usual hallmarks of a plan that's much too clever by half.
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