What happens
Duke Orsino opens the play consumed by his love for Olivia, demanding music to feed his appetite for romance. When told she refuses all suitors and has locked herself away for seven years to mourn her brother, Orsino romanticizes her grief-stricken heart, imagining how deeply she will love him. He commands his attendants to pursue her relentlessly on his behalf.
Why it matters
This scene establishes Orsino as a man intoxicated by the *idea* of love rather than by Olivia herself. His opening line—'If music be the food of love, play on'—reveals someone who treats emotion as appetite, demanding excess until it sickens and dies. He has never met Olivia face to face, yet he constructs an elaborate fantasy around her. When Valentine reports that she has sworn off men entirely, Orsino doesn't retreat; instead, he seizes on her devotion to her dead brother as proof of her capacity for deep feeling, and he decides that such a heart *must* love him. His logic is entirely self-serving: she mourns perfectly, therefore she will love him perfectly. He mistakes her refusal for coyness and her grief for an invitation.
The scene works as a prologue to the play's central problem: the confusion between performance and authenticity, between the role we cast ourselves in and the person underneath. Orsino has already written the script for everyone around him. He has decided who Olivia is and how she will feel, without ever having spoken to her. He sends Cesario as his proxy, a messenger who will 'speak to her in many sorts of music'—yet Orsino has already determined that Olivia's answer will be 'no,' and that her refusal will only prove her worth. In this opening, we see the machinery of self-deception that will drive the entire plot: characters locked in the roles they have chosen for themselves, unable to see the world or the people in it as they actually are.
