As is usual in Shakespeare, he mixes all that with an exploration of friendship. The play explores love and being in love, starting with this naive, adolescent love, and into other areas, such as falling in love at first sight, deluding oneself about someone being in love with one, falling in love with someone of the same sex, using love to further one’s own financial interests, and so on. The opening line and the monologue that follows states that theme.
The play is very much about love – different kinds of love – and all of the characters are affected by it. It’s a very shallow sea, though, because before long he will fall in love with someone else.Īs usual with Shakespeare, where no line is just a pretty string of words, this one isn’t either: like all his lines it has a function. He claims to hope it will work but he doesn’t really mean it, as he continues, in this monologue, to indulge himself in that sea of emotion. He reasons that if music is the food of love, as he has so often heard, having too much of it, like stuffing oneself with too much food, will put him off and he will lose his appetite for being in love with the young woman, a wealthy neighbour, Olivia.
He tells them to play on, and keep playing until he gets sick of it. As the play opens the musicians seem to have paused. The play opens with him sitting in his garden, surrounded by friends and servants, listening to a musical ensemble. He is obviously very young because he expresses an adolescent emotion in a sighing, yearning way more fitting for a teenager than a man, and because his passion is wasted on a woman who he knows is not interested in him. He opens his great comic play, Twelfth Night, with it. ‘If music be the food of love, play on.’ This is one of the most famous opening sentences in all of English literature, and one of Shakespeare’s most quoted lines. Each Shakespeare’s play name links to a range of resources about each play: Character summaries, plot outlines, example essays and famous quotes, soliloquies and monologues: All’s Well That Ends Well Antony and Cleopatra As You Like It The Comedy of Errors Coriolanus Cymbeline Hamlet Henry IV Part 1 Henry IV Part 2 Henry VIII Henry VI Part 1 Henry VI Part 2 Henry VI Part 3 Henry V Julius Caesar King John King Lear Loves Labour’s Lost Macbeth Measure for Measure The Merchant of Venice The Merry Wives of Windsor A Midsummer Night’s Dream Much Ado About Nothing Othello Pericles Richard II Richard III Romeo & Juliet The Taming of the Shrew The Tempest Timon of Athens Titus Andronicus Troilus & Cressida Twelfth Night The Two Gentlemen of Verona The Winter’s Tale This list of Shakespeare plays brings together all 38 plays in alphabetical order.
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