Friar Laurence's Soliloquy Analysis

Everybody’s met one: the girl so mean that at first one would wonder how she got that way, before they give up and just try to stay out of her way. Was she just born with a short temper, or is that how she’s treated at home? And then there’s the boy everyone knows: so sweet and helpful that no matter how long one hangs around him, they never see him lose it. And one would wonder: super-sweet parents or genetically missing a temper? It would be nice to know, in case one day scientists could help couples produce one and not the other. Unfortunately, everyone’s also had the friend who’s nice until someone pushes his buttons and he blows up, while another was thought to be the most selfish, until it was heard she spent Thanksgiving serving dinner to the homeless. Suddenly it’s not so easy to peg how people wind up the way they are. This is a question Shakespeare addressed more than four hundred years ago–the matter of nature versus nurture–in Friar Laurence’s soliloquy. Shakespeare believed people are like the plant that contains a substance that to one is a medicine that heals, and to another it is a poison that kills. Everybody is born with the capability to commit good and to commit evil. Where …show more content…
After ten years of research, Dave Cullen, in his book “Columbine,” described Colorado high school student Dylan Klebold this way: “What a sweet, loving kid. Most of his life.” Klebold and his friend, Eric Harris, murdered a dozen classmates and a teacher in 1999. By all accounts, Klebold came from a loving home, with parents and a brother who cared about him. Yet, at some point in his life, Dylan Klebold chose his own path. In Friar Laurence’s terms, he revolted from his “true birth, stumbling on abuse: Virtue itself turns vice.” No matter how “good” our genes and how strong the love that surrounds us, it’s ultimately up to the individual whether he or she wants to do good or