By beginning in media re, Count Orsino's speech "If music be the food of love" sets out the themes of "Twelfth Night", and suggests his character.
The opening of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night is an interesting example of what the Romans called beginning “in media re”, and what Anthony Trollope referred to as “putting the cart before the horse.” The exhortation “If music be the food of love, play on,” is delivered by Count Orsino, an important character, but not the protagonist, who continues as if the whole audience were aware of the history of his thwarted love for Olivia. There is an obvious difference here between the more straightforward “In sooth, I know not why I am so sad” at the beginning of The Merchant of Venice, and the explanatory “Two families, both alike in dignity/ In fair Verona, where we lay our scene”, which introduces Romeo and Juliet.
In fact, when Trevor Nunn directed a film version of Twelfth Night, he pushed this scene further back, and began with a new cod-Shakespearean prologue explaining “the story so far”, He obviously felt that cinema audiences might not be able to immediately grasp what was going on. The speech is, however, a clever piece of stagecraft by Shakespeare. As the opening line makes clear, Orsino and his courtiers are accompanied by musicians – in the days before stage curtains and lowered lights, striking up music would have been an effective way to catch the attention of the possibly rowdy and inattentive audience, and signal to them that the show was beginning.
The lines also indicate the play’s theme, and the way it will be approached. “If music be the food of love, play on” is an elegant, romantic line, which wouldn’t seem amiss at the beginning of the sonnet. It signals a comedy of wit and love, certainly when contrasted to the ribald farce at the beginning of Jonson’s comedy The Alchemist, which involves the line “Thy worst! I fart at thee!” However, Orsino continues “Give me excess of it that, surfeiting, the appetite/ May sicken, and so die.” The romantic element has been complicated by a suggestion that love is not necessarily desirable, and there is even a hint of perversity in Orsino’s desire to control his appetites by overindulgence rather than denying them.
Having implicitly scorned music, Orsino then rhapsodizes about it, demanding “that strain again”, which “Came o’er my ear like the sweet sound/ That breathes upon a bank of violets”, before stopping the musicians “Enough, no more,/ ‘Tis not so sweet now as it was before.” Love and music are enchanting, this speech suggests, but risky, and can be enjoyed even when the lover knows they’re not healthy.
The passage also hints at Orsino’s character: his languishing verbal ecstasy, his imperious and whimsical moods, his insistence that his wishes be obeyed even if he then changes his mind. For such a short passage, Shakespeare manages to do an awful lot of character and thematic work. As well as writing some classic poetry.
