PROTEUS       Madam, if your heart be so obdurate,

Vouchsafe me yet your picture for my love,

The picture that is hanging in your chamber.

To that I’ll speak, to that I’ll sigh and weep;

For since the substance of your perfect self

Is else devoted, I am but a shadow,

And to your shadow will I make true love.

JULIA  [aside] If ’twere a substance you would sure deceive it
And make it but a shadow, as I am.            (4.2.110-118)

Has Proteus asked himself: could I be creepier? How could I be creepier? Perhaps. Because he’s not being discouraged by Silvia’s unambiguous rejection and opprobrium. Madam, if your heart be so obdurate—if you’re going to continue to hold out on me, you hard-hearted goddess, you—vouchsafe me yet your picture for my love, the picture that is hanging in your chamber. Can I have a picture of you? You know, the one that’s in your bedroom? (Scope here for additional revulsion, if Silvia realises or remembers that he’s been in her room—although probably anachronistic in an early modern context, where chamber, even bed-chamber, could suggest a semi-public room, and it’s already been established that Proteus has been able to visit Silvia in her own room(s).) Ick ick ick, not dodgy at all. And he keeps digging: to that I’ll speak, to that I’ll sigh and weep—I’m going to—talk—to your picture, in a totally non-creepy way; for since the substance of your perfect self is else devoted, I am but a shadow, and to your shadow will I make true love. Because you, actual you, unaccountably love someone else, I’m reduced, I’m a shadow of myself, just a reflection, a kind of ghost—so it’s logical that I’ll, er, make love (he means, speak, flirt, beseech etc but to a modern ear…) to your shadow, your picture.

Looking forward to the crime scene report on this one, once they confiscate Proteus’s phone and hard drive…

But Julia comes back with another heart-broken, yet steely, aside: if ’twere a substance, the real thing, Silvia in real life rather than her picture, you would sure deceive it—you’d betray her too—and make it but a shadow, as I am. I’m nothing, I’m just going through the motions here, a kind of ghost, now that you’ve forsaken me—the sense of abandonment and erasure reinforced by Julia’s disguise as Sebastian at this moment; Julia no longer exists.