LANCE                        Sir, there is a proclamation, that you are vanished.

PROTEUS       That thou art banished. O, that’s the news

From hence, from Silvia, and from me, thy friend.

VALENTINE    O, I have fed upon this woe already,

And now excess of it will make me surfeit.

Doth Silvia know that I am banished?

PROTEUS Ay, ay; and she hath offered to the doom,

Which unreversed, stands in effectual force,

A sea of melting pearl, which some call tears.   (3.1.213-221)

A bit of gratuitous malapropism, to make this tense encounter even more tonally odd: sir, there is a proclamation, that you are vanished, says Lance. Really not helpful (although picking up on Valentine’s nothing—if you’re nothing, you’re clearly invisible). But it gives Proteus a moment to catch his breath—or else slightly interrupts the rhythm of the performance he’s having to give. He takes the opportunity: that thou art banished. (This moment, of course, gets reworked in Romeo and Juliet.) O, that’s the news—the terrible news I have to tell you—that you’re banished, from hence, from Silvia, and from me, thy friend. (It’s almost as if Proteus has a compulsion to perform his own hypocrisy: the worst of it is, you’ve been banished from me! As a result of my betrayal of you! when we’re meant to be best friends!)

Tell me something I don’t know, says Valentine—o, I have fed upon this woe already, and now excess of it will make me surfeit. This is just piling it on. (The Duke has worked fast, it seems, to get a proclamation out, although realism isn’t really what’s at stake here, it’s urgency, crisis, emotions running high.) But then a thought occurs to Valentine: does Silvia know that I am banished? Does she even know yet? If she does know, how is she taking it? Is she suffering as much as I am? Ay, ay, says Proteus, oh yes. She knows. And she hath offered to the doom—she reacted to this terrible sentence, which unreversed, stands in effectual force; if the Duke doesn’t revoke it, then that’s it, it’s binding and in immediate effect (editor hat on: might this be an error for perpetual?)—she cried, as a kind of sacrifice, pleading passionately. She cried and cried; she dissolved into tears—or rather a sea of melting pearl, which some call tears.

This spectacle of Silvia’s suffering seems to have entranced Proteus rather more than his concern for his friend…