If music be the food of love, play on.

This is the first line of Twelfth Night. In his palace, Orsino, Duke of Illyria, is listening to his musicians, sick with love for the Countess Olivia, who will not have him. He wants so much music that his appetite for love will “sicken, and so die”. He asks for a phrase to be played again (“it had a dying fall”), then, a moment later: “Enough! no more: ’Tis not so sweet now as it was before.”

The speech paints a man in love with love itself, as changeable as his moods. When Curio suggests hunting the hart, Orsino puns that he is hunting his own heart. News then arrives that Olivia, mourning her brother, will hide her face for seven years.

Shakespeare wrote the comedy around 1600 or 1601. Orsino will end up marrying not Olivia but Viola, the shipwrecked young woman disguised as his page. The opening line is often quoted as a tribute to music; in the play, it is also gently comic.

Twelfth Night, Act I, scene 1 (Orsino), 1602

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