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Silvius and Phoebe are a young shepherd and shepherdess that Rosalind, Celia, and Touchstone meet during their stay in the Forest of Arden. Silvius is hopelessly in love with Phoebe, but she only treats him with disdain. However, the pair are ultimately married by the end of the play. Shakespeare uses their comedic subplot to introduce one of the play’s key themes: the foolishness of love. Silvius repeatedly presents himself as love’s only true victim and implies that no one has ever loved as he loves Phoebe. He is so consumed by his love that he has fallen into borderline madness and claims that Phoebe’s rejection has the power to kill him. For example, in 3.5, he claims that Phoebe is worse than a “common executioner” because at least they ask for forgiveness before taking someone's life (3.5.3). Silvius’s melodramatic laments may be deeply serious to him, but they are comical to the reader due to his ridiculous depiction of love and romance. Shakespeare often uses Phoebe to expose the absurdity of Silvius’s lines by dragging his professions into the harsh, unforgiving light of reality. For example, taken literally, Silvius’s insistence that his lover’s eyes are his “executioner” seems hopelessly ineffectual when Phoebe demands, “Now show the wound mine eye hath made in thee” (3.5.21). Through Silvius and Phoebe, Shakespeare argues that love can turn people into fools.
Shakespeare also uses Silvius and Phoebe to highlight the benefits of a realistic love as opposed to an idealized one. Silvius initially represents the Petrarchan style of romantic love—a term referring to the 14th-century poet, Petrarch, who wrote sonnets that placed the object of his affection on an unattainable and romanticized pedestal. Silvius, like Orlando, needs to learn that a realistic love between two people with an authentic understanding of one another is better than a melodramatic love that keeps people from seeing reason or sense. After all, Rosalind’s claim that “[m]en have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love” is as applicable to Silvius as it is to Orlando (4.1.112-113). It is important to note that Phoebe is not exempt from Shakespeare’s criticism. Through “Ganymede’s” lecture in 3.5, Shakespeare argues that Phoebe should consider herself lucky to have inspired the affections of a man like Silvius and that she should marry him instead of looking for an unrealistic partner (which she does by the end of the play). Shakespeare utilizes Silvius and Phoebe’s marriage plot to suggest that real love is a union between two ordinary people (with both flaws and charms) as opposed to a Petrarchan sonnet that is flowery but lacking in any real substance.
