Thwarted in love, or what he thinks is his love for the Countess Olivia, Orsino opens the play with a sweet but cynical speech about the inconstancy of love. He basically says it’s just like appetite—what tastes good for a while then begins to be “not so sweet now as it was before.” He doesn’t compare love to any higher emotion or even hint that it has a spiritual dimension or the possibility of constancy. Indeed, the Duke even suggests that a person in love can become a connoisseur of his or her emotions as they sour, not just when they are fresh and new: he loves the “dying fall” in the music and the “excess” that causes all emotion to “sicken, and so die.” This sweet pessimism about love’s sour transience reaches its culmination in
