Friar Francis: How to see the light

One of my favorite scenes in Much Ado About Nothing, which opens tonight at the Stonington Opera House in Maine, comes rather late in the play -- when Friar Francis devises a plan to save Hero's reputation and to preserve the intended nuptials between her and her beloved Claudio. The friar basically kills off Hero for a while -- much in the same way Friar Lawrence did in Romeo and Juliet but with a much more comedic outcome. Shakespeare wrote R&J first, but the device of a fake death must have lingered in his writer's mind. Friar Francis explores the momentary death idea again, this time without drugs. In a powerful monologue about remorse -- where he knows that in Claudio's "study of imagination" the young lover will feel regret over his loss of Hero -- Friar Francis gives us a moving portrait of how we cope with loss and how we remember those we have wronged yet still love.