PROTEUS       I will forget that Julia is alive,

Remembering that my love to her is dead,

And Valentine I’ll hold an enemy,

Aiming at Silvia as a sweeter friend.

I cannot now prove constant to myself

Without some treachery used to Valentine.           (2.6.27-32)

Proteus has made his mind up, and he sounds shockingly callous—there may (should?) be gasps from the audience: I will forget that Julia is alive, remembering that my love to her is dead. She’s dead to me, basically, I have to forget about her completely; also, she’s mostly only existed in so far as she’s been the object of my love and so, if I don’t love her any longer, then in a way she ceases to exist? (Never mind the pernicious influence of rhetorical training on young men, how’s this for education in logic?) Even more shockingly—by some reckoning, including Proteus’s own—Valentine I’ll hold an enemy, aiming at Silvia as a sweeter friend. Yes, I’m actually prepared to betray my best buddy over a girl. He’s my friend, he’s been my companion, my other self—but I’m going to give that up, in order that I might have a chance at a Relationship with Silvia, a sweeter friend—a friend with benefits, as it were. This alteration is partly being enabled by the breadth of meaning ascribed to friend in early modern usage: it can mean extended family, relative, and lover, as well as friend in the modern sense. Proteus is going against a much fetishized early modern code which places friendship between men, especially a friendship which has begun in childhood, above all other relationships, seeing it as being explicitly in opposition to, and superior to a relationship between a man and a women. (Bros before hoes, basically…) Hitherto Proteus has regarded Valentine his friend as his other self, but he has decided that I cannot now prove constant to myself, I can’t be genuinely and fully myself, true to myself, without some treachery used to Valentine. In order to get what I want—what I need, what I deserve—I’ll have to betray him. Like Julia, he’s just collateral damage in my self-actualisation as a man.