VALENTINE   And on a love-book pray for my success?

PROTEUS       Upon some book I love I’ll pray for thee.

VALENTINE That’s on some shallow story of deep love–

How young Leander crossed the Hellespont.

PROTEUS That’s a deep story of a deeper love,

For he was more than over-shoes in love.

VALENTINE ’Tis true, for you are over-boots in love,

And yet you never swam the Hellespont.

PROTEUS Over the boots? Nay, give me not the boots.

VALENTINE No, I will not; for it boots thee not.

PROTEUS What?                               (1.1.19-28)

Puns! Banter! WIT. There will be a lot more of this… Haha, if you’re going to pray for me, retorts Valentine, then will it be on a love-book, rather than on a bible or with a prayerbook, seeing as that’s all you read nowadays? (A book of romances, or perhaps an anthology of poems?) Proteus has an answer, of course: upon some book I love I’ll pray for thee; that could still be the bible, yeah? Oh I know you too well, Valentine comes back: that’s on some shallow story of deep love (because love-books, books about love, plays about love, like this one are superficial, even if they’re concerned with grand passion)—and I know what you’ve been reading, the story of how young Leander crossed the Hellespont. The story was well-known, but the allusion is not impossibly to Marlowe’s poem in particular, which was circulating in manuscript before Marlowe’s death in 1593 and may have been written considerably earlier; (Shakespeare certainly knew it by 1595, when he was writing Romeo and Juliet.) Leander is an archetype of the passionate, faithful, doomed lover; in Marlowe’s version he is also an ardent seducer and described in notably homoerotic terms in his encounter with Neptune as he swims. Proteus certainly knows what Valentine’s referring to—that’s a deep story of a deeper love, not superficial at all—but the main point is setting up a bit of wordplay later on, something that this play does over and over again: Leander was more than over-shoes in love, he wasn’t just going for a paddle in the Hellespont, was he? Proteus, however, is over-boots in love, in over his knees—or over his head—even though he never swam the Hellespont. (Is there a dig there? and you still haven’t managed to, ahem, get into your Hero’s tower?) Over the boots? Nay, give me not the boots. Don’t mock me, mate, I don’t deserve a kicking. (There could be, editors suggest, an allusion to the instrument of torture known as the boot. This editor isn’t convinced.) No, I will not; for it boots thee not. It’s not doing you any good, being in love; it’s entirely unprofitable. What? says Proteus. The bantering stichomythia is neat (Romeo and Mercutio will do it better, but it’s a start) and this internal rhyme, making up the line, is both a nice example of how the verse can run like near-clockwork and a further signal of the intimacy of these friends. It is at the level of the verse, at least, but not so much in Proteus’s response: what are you on about? this isn’t going quite where I thought it was going, this moderately camp bit of banter about Leander’s sodden footwear.