24/11/2025
Twelfth Night
Act 1, Scene 1 — Overview & Discussion
Shakespeare opens Twelfth Night with one of his most famous musical lines: “If music be the food of love, play on.” Immediately we are immersed in the play’s world of longing, imagination, excess, and emotional self-indulgence. The scene introduces Duke Orsino, the ruler of Illyria, who is deeply in love with the Countess Olivia, a woman who refuses his advances because she is mourning her brother.
This scene establishes several major themes of the play:
1. Love as Excess / Love as Self-Deception
Orsino’s extravagant language and melodramatic style suggest a man more in love with the idea of being in love than with Olivia herself. He treats love like an art form, something that can be heightened by music, imagery, and poetic thought.
2. Music and Emotion
Music becomes a metaphor for love—both a nourishment and a poison. Orsino hopes it will feed his desire to the point of making him sick of it. The idea that emotional appetites can be fed, overfed, and sickened recurs throughout the play.
3. Emotional Contradiction
Orsino is simultaneously overwhelmed by love and repelled by it; it is sweet and bitter, healing and destructive. This kind of emotional instability will be mirrored later by other characters (Olivia, Viola, Malvolio).
4. Olivia as an Absent Ideal
Though Olivia isn’t present, the scene establishes her as a sort of sacred figure—someone whose beauty and virtue are so perfect that Orsino feels spiritually transformed by her.
5. Orsino’s Self-Indulgence
His desire to wallow in emotion sets the tone for the play’s exploration of romantic absurdity, melancholy, and mistaken passion. His court encourages his indulgence, feeding his poetic fantasies.
**Line-by-Line Commentary
(Act 1, Scene 1)**
“If music be the food of love, play on.”
Orsino begins with a striking metaphor: music nourishes love. He wants more music to feed his overwhelming feelings.
“Give me excess of it, that surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.”
He hopes that by overindulging, he might rid himself of passionate longing—like eating too much of a favorite food until you cannot stand it.
“That strain again! It had a dying fall;”
He calls attention to a particular musical phrase. The “dying fall” reflects the fading quality of his own mood—melancholy and soft.
“O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odour.”
A sensuous simile: the music feels like a gentle breeze moving over flowers, mingling scent and air. Orsino’s language idealizes beauty as something ephemeral and delicate.
“Enough; no more:
'Tis not so sweet now as it was before.”
He changes his mind abruptly—typical of his emotional volatility. What delighted him moments ago now feels cloying.
“O spirit of love, how quick and fresh art thou,
That, notwithstanding thy capacity
Receiveth as the sea, nought enters there,
Of what validity and pitch soe'er,
But falls into abatement and low price
Even in a minute!”
A long reflection: love is endlessly capable of receiving new impressions (“as the sea”), yet everything, no matter how valuable, quickly loses intensity. This expresses Orsino’s frustration with his own shifting desires.
“So full of shapes is fancy
That it alone is high fantastical.”
Love (or “fancy”) is full of constantly changing images. Orsino frames love as imagination, fantasy, not reality.
Enter Curio and other attendants.
Curio: “Will you go hunt, my lord?”
Curio attempts to lighten the mood. Hunting is a typical aristocratic pastime.
Orsino: “What, Curio?”
A distracted response—he’s still lost in thought.
Curio: “The hart.”
A pun. Curio means a deer, but Shakespeare wants us to hear heart—Orsino’s wounded heart in love.
Orsino: “Why, so I do, the noblest that I have.”
Orsino continues the pun, claiming he hunts a “noble hart/heart”—meaning Olivia. He is enamored of his own wordplay and imagery.
“O, when mine eyes did see Olivia first,
Methought she purged the air of pestilence!”
An extravagant claim: her beauty cleansed the world of sickness. Orsino elevates her to a quasi-saintly figure.
“That instant was I turned into a hart,
And my desires, like fell and cruel hounds,
E'er since pursue me.”
He extends the hunting metaphor. He becomes the wounded deer, chased by his own passions. His love becomes self-torture, reinforcing his melodramatic identity.
Enter Valentine.
Orsino: “How now! what news from her?”
Expectant and impatient. He hopes for a message from Olivia.
Valentine:
“So please my lord, I might not be admitted;
But from her handmaid do return this answer:”
Olivia refuses to see him—but sends a message through a servant.
“The element itself, till seven years' heat,
Shall not behold her face at ample view;”
She vows not to show her face publicly for seven years.
“But, like a cloistress, she will veiled walk
And water once a day her chamber round
With eye-offending brine:”
Olivia plans to behave like a nun (“cloistress”), veiled and cloistered. “Eye-offending brine” refers to tears—saltwater stinging the eyes.
“all this to season
A brother's dead love, which she would keep fresh
And lasting in her sad remembrance.”
She mourns her dead brother deeply, performing ritual lamentation to preserve his memory.
Orsino:
“O, she that hath a heart of that fine frame
To pay this debt of love but to a brother,
How will she love, when the rich golden shaft
Hath kill'd the flock of all affections else
That live in her!”
Orsino imagines that if she loves her brother so intensely, her romantic love (once awakened by Cupid’s “golden shaft”) would be even more powerful. This is a revealing misinterpretation—he assumes her devotion proves she will love him even more.
“When liver, brain, and heart,
These sovereign thrones, are all supplied, and fill'd
Her sweet perfections with one self king!”
He imagines her inner faculties (emotion, intellect, passion) ruled by one sovereign—him. The imagery is self-aggrandizing.
“Away before me to sweet beds of flowers:
Love-thoughts lie rich when canopied with bowers.”
He orders his attendants ahead—he wants to go where he can recline among flowers and indulge his romantic fantasies. The line connects love to luxury, artifice, and idle imagination.
Exeunt.
Illustration: Twelfth Night: Orsino, Mr. Robert Taber
Charles A. Buchel
