Romeo and Juliet - the Importance of Secondary Characters

Secondary characters have played roles in stories in both fiction and history, from the actions of Paris and Odysseus in the Iliad, to the barbaric destruction done by the generals of Genghis Khan, to the planning of the Iraq War by the officers and aides of President George W. Bush. Secondary characters are characters that are not the central characters that are the mainstay of a story, but still keep relevance because of their actions and proceedings that have great influence in a story. Secondary characters are an essential part of a plot, as demonstrated by the character Friar Lawrence in a well-known play of the English playwright and poet Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet. The actions that he takes, along with the influences he has on the main characters, and the fact that he has ideals that relates to the themes of Romeo and Juliet show that he, as a second character, is important to the plot of the play.
Friar Lawrence's actions are an essential part of the play, and they often end up heavily influencing or determining the plot. Friar Lawrence first appears in the play in Act II, where Romeo tells the Friar how he wishes to marry Juliet. The Friar is wary of Romeo's infatuation at first, but later agrees to marry them, saying, "In one respect I'll thy assistant be [to marry her]" (II, iii, 97). The Friar, despite his disapproval of Romeo's "love", agrees to marry him to Juliet anyways, and he does. This is an important plot development in the story, as now the only children of the rival and warring houses of Capulet and Montague are married, but more important, Juliet's parent's plans for her marriage to Paris are now complicated because she is already married to Romeo. For her to marry two men is complete blasphemy. When Romeo is banished, and Juliet is about to be married to Paris, Juliet goes to Friar Lawrence and threatens suicide if he does not find a solution, as he was the one who complicated the situation in the first place. The Friar calms Juliet and formulates a plan:
Take thou this vial [of poison...]
And this distilling liquor drink thou off [..]
[Thou shall be] stark and cold, appear like death, [...]
Thou shalt be borne to that same ancient vault [of the Capulets...]
Shall Romeo by my letters know our drift,
And hither shall he come
Bear thee hence to Mantua.
And this shall free thee from his present shame.
(IV, I, 95-120)

Juliet, with no choice but to accept the Friar's plan, "dies"; however, the Friar, in his rash planning, is unable to see any possible complications - Romeo does not receive the letter, and wrongly believes Juliet is actually dead. The Friar's plan causes for the climax of the story, the death of all three; his plan and its failure causes Romeo to go to Juliet and commit suicide, and Juliet, waking later, seeing Romeo dead, commits suicide. Other factors come into play, and other events may have occurred, but it is the Friar and his inability to sense possible difficulties that caused the two to die and for the story to come to a resolution. And thus, the actions of the Friar are very important to the story; they not only cause the chain of events that lead to the play's resolution, but the are a large part of the chain of events.
The influences of Friar Lawrence on the characters' development, likewise, are also very important to the story. The Friar, by marrying Romeo and Juliet, allows them, in a way, to eventually "develop" their characters. He allows them to mature from children to adults, simply put. After Romeo kills Tybalt, Juliet's cousin, and is lamenting and going insane, the Friar tells him, "Ascend [Juliet's] chamber. Hence and comfort her" (III, iii, 157). The nature of the maturity is then obviously clear - it is sexual. Through marrying them, they learn what they did not know in their childhood innocence. Still, the Friar also is one of the last to influence the characters. The Friar's failed plan causes Romeo to overreact (again), and causes him to, if not rashly, tragically commit suicide. Romeo tries to defy fate and spend "eternity" with Juliet. Not only does he now have the will to defy his "parents' name" through marriage to Juliet, to defy his own unmanliness to fight and kill Tybalt, to defy the law by returning to Verona to Juliet, and now, he has the will to defy fate itself. This is the last character development of Romeo, as he dies right after. And so, the Friar influences the development of characters through his activities in the play.
The Friar is also important as that he clearly reflects the themes of the play. One such theme in the play is the scorning of courtly love, of false love, of infatuation. The Friar, upon hearing Romeo's new "love" in Act II, declares, "Women may fall when there's no strength in men" (II, iii, 85). Romeo's sudden lowering of his view of his old "love" Rosaline for Juliet surprises the Friar. He condemns Romeo, saying that if he would so quickly switch his emotions from Rosaline to Juliet, then his love is not truly love, but simply false love, infatuation, and is a complete waste of time. However, when he later agrees to marry them, he reflects on another theme: "For this [marriage] may so happy prove/to turn your households' rancor to pure love" (II, iii, 98-99).The Friar is hoping for "love to conquer all". In the end, when Romeo and Juliet die, love does in a way conquer all, when the deaths of their only children bring the houses of Capulet and Montague to their senses, and this stops the violent feud. So, in the end, the Friar can be of importance to the story because he reveals multiple underlying themes of the play.
Friar Lawrence shows his importance to Romeo and Juliet through his actions, influences, and reflections. His choices very much often drive the plot; he proves that secondary characters are an essential part to any story in any case, for they often are the ones that influence the plot as greatly as the main characters themselves, sometimes more. Likewise, in life, minor things or smaller entities often influence the greater chain of events, whether it is the one soldier who valiantly charges into the fray and inspires his peers, changing the course of a battle and history, or whether it is that one poor scientist who discovers and invents a technology that would change lives forever, or whether it is that one unimportant childhood rivalry that leads to a massive war. Sun Tzu, the great Chinese strategist, once said similarly, "That one arrow that kills the general may make the soldiers falter, but that [may change] when one lieutenant bravely and grandly inspires and raise the soldier's spirits [...] A good general [watches] not only for the [general] things, but the smaller ones as well."