VALENTINE    And why not death, rather than living torment?

To die is to be banished from myself,

And Silvia is myself. Banished from her

Is self from self – a deadly banishment.

What light is light, if Silvia be not seen?

What joy is joy, if Silvia be not by?

(Unless it be to think that she is by,

And feed upon the shadow of perfection.)            (3.1.170-177)

Valentine has been completely exposed and made a fool of, and yet it’s impossible not to be at least a bit sympathetic here as, utterly stunned, he processes what’s just happened. Romeo will dial up the adolescent hysteria and hyperbole a few years later, but Valentine has a dignified pathos, located less in what he says than in the control of the verse, which is—of course—much better than the poem that ‘he’ wrote. He reels, as if from a blow: and why not death, rather than living torment? Because that’s what it means, to be parted from Silvia, a kind of death, because to die is to be banished from myself, and Silvia is myself. She’s part of me, my other self—actually here Valentine’s using language typically associated with the friendship between two men, the friend as second self, the very kind of relationship that has been betrayed by Proteus’s treachery, although of course Valentine doesn’t know that yet. To be banished from her is self from self—a deadly banishment, a kind of death, as if forcible separating soul from body, a catastrophic rupture.

And, furthermore, what light is light, if Silvia be not seen? Daylight, torchlight, starlight, candlelight—they’re all meaningless and pointless if they don’t illuminate Silvia. What joy is joy, if Silvia be not by? The world out of her presence is joyless, meaningless and pointless too; there’s no possibility of happiness out of her company. Unless—a small moment of consolation, enabled by the very imagining of her absence, conjuring a kind of absent presence—it be to think that she is by, and feed upon the shadow of perfection. Dreams and misapprehensions, even those might keep me going for a little bit longer, because her presence is so evocative that even its imagined traces have a kind of power; her perfection is such that its echoes, its vaguest recollections might sustain me. I can live on such delusions. The enjambment gives a kind of hopeful animation to even that delusion, after the deadened end-stops of the previous two lines. Silly though he may be, Valentine’s soliloquy has a lyrical, despairing sweetness; it’s nowhere near an aria, but it still moves.