With a female confidante, such as a servant or kinswoman, in whose company they can talk of love. And in a position of vulnerability, away from home, where their courage is tested and they have to live by their wits (for example, by taking on male disguise), but where they have unprecedented freedom to explore and express their true selves, their hopes, fears, and desires. Silvia enters in the first role, under the eye of her father, the Duke of Milan, as he measures up her potential suitors. The beautiful lady of courtly romance, she is the object of men’s devoted gaze and fantastic desire, a woman on a pedestal who reveals little of her inner life. Julia, by contrast, wears her heart upon her sleeve as she moves from the second to the third of the female situations when she sets off in pursuit of Proteus. Her decision to do so reveals the sexual double standard that was pervasive in Shakespeare’s time: whereas a young man is condemned for “sluggardizing” at home, a young woman risks being made the object of scandal by setting out from home.

One of Shakespeare’s favorite techniques was the dramatically ironic counterpointing of scenes: we see Julia proving her love for Proteus by setting off on her dangerous journey immediately after we have seen Proteus renouncing his love for Julia because he has been smitten by the sight of Silvia. The scene when Valentine introduces his best friend to the girl he has fallen in love with is brief but very subtly written. It turns on the correspondence between the language of courtesy and that of courtship. Valentine asks Silvia to welcome Proteus “with some special favour” and to “entertain him” in her service. What he means is “please treat my friend with respect,” but since in the courtly idiom the language of service is synonymous with that of love, Proteus is given an opening to project himself into the role of a rival lover—when Silvia modestly refers to herself as a “worthless mistress” he responds by saying that he would fight to the death anyone else who described her thus. In a sense, the crux of the play lies in the double meaning of the word “mistress.”

Proteus explores his own transformation in two soliloquies that come in rapid succession. In the first, he introduces the image of his love for Julia as akin to a wax image melted to oblivion by the heat of his new desire for Silvia. At the same time, he recognizes that what he has fallen in love with is merely a “picture,” the outer image of her beauty. The play begins to probe more deeply into the nature of love when in later scenes a series of questions are asked about the relationship between the “shadow” of surface beauty and the “substance” or “essence” of personality within. In parallel with this motif, the action develops the concerns of Proteus’ second major soliloquy: making and breaking vows, finding and losing selves, and the conflict between “sweet-suggesting Love” and “the law of friendship.” “In love,” Proteus asks at the play’s crisis point, “Who respects friend?”

Prior to the last few years of Shakespeare’s career, his plays were performed without an interval. Despite this, there is often a perceptible change in the action at the beginning of the fourth act. The plot has been wound to the full, so now the unwinding begins. Here the turning point is marked by the movement away from court and city to a wood peopled by some rather genteel Outlaws. One of them swears “By the bare scalp of Robin Hood’s fat friar,” and it is the jolly camaraderie of the merry men, stripped of the old story’s violence and political edge, that is evoked by these Outlaws.

Desire feeds itself on rejection. The more Silvia spurns Proteus, the more he desires her. By the same account, the more he spurns Julia, the more she dotes on him. In the play’s richest sequence, music is introduced to establish a nocturnal setting in which Proteus displaces Turio and woos Silvia at her window, not knowing that he is overheard by Julia in her page-boy disguise: This is her dark night of the soul. But then in a bold and very Shakespearean twist, when Proteus confronts the disguised Julia face-to-face he takes rather a fancy to her boy self: “Sebastian is thy name? I like thee well and will employ thee in some service presently.” The words “employ” and “service” maintain the punning on the shared language of domestic obligation and sexual engagement. Anticipating Viola in Twelfth Night, Julia finds herself in the painful position of being “servant” to the man whose “mistress” she really wants to be. Hitherto Proteus has regarded Julia as nothing more than a decorative blonde. Now that he thinks she is Sebastian, he unwittingly begins to intuit her inner qualities.

At this point, the play reaches its highest point of sophistication and self-conscious artfulness. The audience is offered two images: a portrait of Silvia and a description of Sebastian, dressed in Julia’s clothes, playing the part of a rejected lover, Ariadne deserted by Theseus in a famous story from classical mythology. The contrast between the two images effectively turns the scene into a Shakespearean claim for the superiority not only of the player’s art to the portrait painter’s but also of his own dramatization of love to the static vision of courtly romance. The painting, like the lady of romance, is but a “senseless form” to be “worshipped, kissed, loved and adored.” The actor, by contrast, can evoke the real pain of passion so convincingly (“so lively acted”) that the audience may be moved to tears. No one is better than Proteus at expressing eternal adoration in the artful language—all sighs and poetic hyperbole—of the courtly lover, but his fickleness reveals the essential insincerity of the code.