Duke Orsino begins Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night, or What You Will” with the famous lines, “If music be the food of love, play on; / Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, / The appetite may sicken, and so die.” The poetry is lovely. But what is he really asking for?
Orsino desires an “excess” of “love-food” so that his taste will sicken and die. He wants to be overloaded with love-sickness, to wallow in his forlorn feelings of melancholy. He enjoys the sadness as he loafs about his palace, listening to sad songs and composing love poems, pining for a woman he really knows little about. Orsino reveals, from the very beginning of the play, that he’s in love with being in love.