VALENTINE    Except I be by Silvia in the night,

There is no music in the nightingale.

Unless I look on Silvia in the day,

There is no day for me to look upon.

She is my essence, and I leave to be

If I be not by her fair influence

Fostered, illumined, cherished, kept alive.

I fly not death to fly his deadly doom.

Tarry I here, I but attend on death,

But fly I hence, I fly away from life.            (3.1.178-187)

 

There is a touching stop-all-the-clocks vibe to this, even as it still performs the self-dramatising bathos (my-life-is-OVER) of adolescence. It’s mostly because the lines are so beautifully balanced and so subtle in their shifts: except I be by Silvia in the night, there is no music in the nightingale. She’s music to me; without her, music is just noise. (A fleeting recollection of a moonlit garden, shared rapture in the darkness as the nightingale sings.) Unless I look on Silvia in the day, there is no day for me to look upon. She’s light, life—day itself—my everything. Silvia is music and day, being is paralleled with looking, proximity with at least some distance, the better to allow for gazing. Without her, I can’t see anything, feel anything; I can barely survive, because she is my essence, and I leave to be—she’s my soul, and I cease to exist if I don’t have her there to look after me, give me light, love me and sustain me. It’s by her fair influence, her example, her gravitational pull, her beauty, her love, that I am fostered, illumined, cherished, kept alive. (That there’s been little evidence either of a relationship of this nature or of Silvia as being capable of this sort of thing is, at least for the moment, beside the point. Partly—of course—Valentine is in love with the version of himself that loving Silvia reflects back to him, as lovable and worthy of care.)

And so I fly not death to fly his deadly doom: if I leave Milan, I’m not really escaping the worst part of the Duke’s sentence of banishment, and I’m not evading death in any way at all. Sure, if I wait around here, tarry I here, I’ll just be waiting for the blow to fall, I but attend on death. Only a matter of time. But fly I hence, I fly away from life. Leaving Milan—that’s a kind of death too, turning my back on everything that gives me life and makes that life worth living.

Poor Valentine, indeed a martyr for love… (this is of course the bit that makes Paltrow fall in love with Shakespeare–even before she realises he’s actually the young Joseph Fiennes–in Shakespeare in Love)