What It Is
The distilled liquid that Friar Laurence gives Juliet in a vial in Scene 1 of Act IV: drunk in bed, it makes the body seem dead for forty-two hours, so that Juliet is carried to the family tomb while a letter warns Romeo. He is announced earlier, in Scene 3 of Act II, when the friar gathers herbs at dawn and meditates on the poison and the remedy each plant holds.
Where It Appears
In Scene 3 of Act II, Friar Laurence gathers herbs and speaks of the poison and remedy each plant holds, and says that virtue turns into vice when misapplied.
In Scene 1 of Act IV, Juliet threatens to kill herself, and the friar proposes the potion. She accepts.
Be not so long to speak. I long to die, / If what thou speak’st speak not of remedy.(IV.1)
In Scene 3 of Act IV, Juliet, alone, lists what can go wrong: the potion failing, being poison, or her waking in the crypt before Romeo arrives. She sees Tybalt's ghost and drinks.
Romeo, Romeo, Romeo, here’s drink! I drink to thee.(IV.3)
In Scene 5 of Act IV, the Nurse finds Juliet motionless, and the house takes her for dead. The friar, who knows the plan, consoles the parents with words about heaven and organizes the procession.
In Scene 2 of Act V, the letter with the plan did not reach Romeo: Friar John was locked in a house suspected of plague. Laurence knows that Juliet will wake in a few hours and goes alone to the tomb.
Poor living corse, clos’d in a dead man’s tomb.(V.2)
In Scene 3 of Act V, when Juliet wakes, Romeo has already drunk the apothecary's poison, and the friar, telling everything to the parents, explains the potion as a sleep that took hold.
What It Means
Two meanings come out of the whole. The first is the ambivalence announced in the herb scene: the same substance serves as remedy or harm depending on its use, and the potion that frees Juliet from the marriage to Paris contributes to her death. The second is that of information: the friar's plan depends on a letter, and in Scene 2 of Act V the letter does not arrive. The liquid works; the warning fails.
The potion is the point at which the play comes closest to giving the lovers a way out, and it is there that it hands her over to a gap in information. The one who drinks it is Juliet, alone, after dismissing the Nurse and her mother, with no one who can say for her whether the friar got it right.
Relationships
- Standard themes: Death, Fate and free will, Love.
- Characters: Friar Laurence, who devises it, Juliet, who drinks it, and Romeo, who does not receive the warning.
- Related symbols: the Capulet tomb, where the effect should have ended.