Summary: Act I, scene i
If music be the food of love, play on,
. . .
O spirit of love, how quick and fresh are thou.
. . .
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In the land of Illyria, Duke Orsino enters, attended by
his lords. Orsino is hopelessly in love with the beautiful Lady
Olivia and pines away for her. He refuses to hunt and orders musicians
to entertain him while he thinks about his desire for Olivia. His
servant Valentine reminds him that Olivia does not return his love
or even listen to the messages he sends her. We learn from Valentine
that Olivia is in mourning for her brother, who has recently died.
She wears a dark veil, and she has vowed that no one will see her
face for another seven years—and she refuses to marry anyone until
then. Orsino, obsessed with the woman who keeps refusing him, wants
only to lie around on beds of flowers, listening to sweet music
and dreaming of Olivia.
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Act I, scene i →
Summary: Act I, scene ii
Meanwhile, on the Illyrian sea coast, a young noblewoman
named Viola speaks with the captain whose crew has just rescued
her from a shipwreck. Although Viola was found and rescued, her
brother, Sebastian, seems to have vanished in the storm. The captain
tells Viola that Sebastian may still be alive. He says that he saw
Sebastian trying to keep afloat by tying himself to a broken mast.
But Viola does not know whether or not it is worth holding onto
hope. In the meantime, however, she needs to find a way to support
herself in this strange land.
The ship’s captain tells Viola all about Duke Orsino,
who rules Illyria. Viola remarks that she has heard of this duke
and mentions that he used to be a bachelor. The captain says that
Orsino still is a bachelor, but then goes on to tell Viola about
the Lady Olivia, whom the duke is courting. Again, we hear the tale
of how Lady Olivia’s brother died, leading her to cut herself off
from the world. Viola expresses a wish that she could become a servant
in the house of Olivia and hide herself away from the world as well.
The captain responds that it is unlikely that Viola will enter Olivia’s
service because Olivia refuses to see any visitors, the duke included.
Viola decides that, in that case, she will disguise herself as a
young man and seek service with Duke Orsino instead. When she promises
to pay him well, the captain agrees to help her, and they go off
together in order to find a disguise for her.
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Act I, scene ii →
Analysis: Act I, scenes i–ii
Viola’s plan for disguising herself in Act I, scene ii
introduces one of the central motifs of the play: disguise and the
identity confusion related to it. Similarly, Orsino’s mournful speech
in Act I, scene i lets us know that the play will also concern matters
of love: emotion, desire, and rejection. Put together, the two scenes
suggest the extra twist that is the hallmark of Twelfth
Night: mistaken gender identity. Twelfth Night is
one of the plays referred to as Shakespeare’s “transvestite comedies,”
and Viola’s gender deception leads to all kinds of romantic complications.
The opening lines of Twelfth Night, in
which a moping Orsino, attended by his servants and musicians, says,
“If music be the food of love, play on,” establish how love has
conquered Orsino (I.i.1). His speech on this
subject is rather complicated, as he employs a metaphor to try to
establish some control over love. He asks for the musicians to give
him so much music—the “food of love”—that he will overdose (“surfeit”
[I.i.2]) and not be hungry for love any longer.
Orsino’s trick proves too simple, however; while it makes him tire
of the music, it fails to stop him from thinking about love.
Orsino also makes a pertinent comment about the relationship between
romance and imagination: “So full of shapes is fancy / That it alone
is high fantastical” (I.i.14–15). This comment
relates the idea of overpowering love (“fancy”) to that of imagination
(that which is “fantastical”), a connection that is appropriate
for both Orsino and Twelfth Night as a whole. Beginning
in this scene, the play repeatedly raises the question of whether
romantic love has more to do with the person who is loved or with
the lover’s own imagination—whether love is real or merely something
that the human mind creates for the sake of entertainment and delight.
In the case of Orsino, the latter seems to be true, as he is less
in love with Olivia herself than he is with the idea of being in
love with Olivia. He claims to be devastated because she will not
have him, but as the audience watches him wallow in his seeming
misery, it is difficult to escape the impression that he is enjoying
himself—flopping about on rose-covered beds, listening to music,
and waxing eloquent about Olivia’s beauty to his servants. The genuineness
of Orsino’s emotions comes into question even further when he later
switches his affections from Olivia to Viola without a second thought;
the audience then suspects that he does not care whom he
is in love with, as long as he can be in love.
