Author Description

ROMEO; plus Juliet is an autobiographical narrative, begun in 1550 by Friar Lorenzo Frier and completed in 1555 shortly before he was murdered in Messina. "Part One: Adonis" is full of sunshine and youthful joie de vivre, being chiefly comprised of a comic erotic poem that narrates Friar Lorenzo's first great romantic fling: At age eighteen, before he was ordained, Frier fell in love with "Adonis" (not his real name), the son of Russian nobility who visited Umbertide in the year 1521. Readers with no patience for cheerful boyish poetry may simply scoot ahead to Part Two, by which time the tormented clergyman - surrounded now by decadent aristocrats and a corrupt Church - has morphed into a spiritual monster. (The 16th century was an age when Holy Church punished with torture and death any same-sex affair between consenting adults but overlooked child sexual molestation as a harmless pastime.) When Friar Lorenzo resumes writing at age fifty, he is a frustrated priest, long forgotten by "Adonis" and recently forsaken by Romeo Montague. In Shakespeare's corrupt version, Romeo dies in the Capulet mausoleum. The historical Romeo Montague died in Lugano's Maison de Sante, a sixteenth-century asylum for hopeless idiots. Friar Frier in the wake of that personal tragedy seems almost a different person - dark, brooding, morose, quite possibly insane. His writing is not without genius. But as our only eyewitness account of the historic Montague-Capulet feud, and of the love of Romeo for Juliet, Frier's "Romeo" proves to be a much gloomier, more tawdry, affair than the fictional and sweetly sentimental play that Shakespeare made of it forty years later. The friar's tragedy is a perverse tale of Gothic horror, ending in a grim catastrophe for which the friar himself was largely to blame. Before he died, Friar Frier redeemed himself through the surgical castration of boy-orphans, whom he recruited to serve in Church choirs across Europe, a labor of love. Lorenzo Frier died in the