Critics consider Twelfth Night to be one of William Shakespeare's most poetic and musical plays. Shakespeare writes poetic lines for the main characters, Viola, Orsino, and Olivia, and gives the Fool and other minor characters songs to sing throughout the play. The play's particularly romantic lines make the characters seem like professional poets themselves. Shakespeare also uses the music and poetry of Twelfth Night to foreshadow what will happen in the rest of the performance and to reveal the major themes of the play. Music and poetry themselves become major characters in the play. The opening monologue of Act I, Scene I, given by Duke Orsino, is another perfect example of Shakespeare using music to show the upcoming storyline of the play. At first, Orsino uses music as a metaphor that feeds the appetite for love. He talks for a minute about his love for music, then abruptly changes, saying, “Enough; no more” (7). Shakespeare already foreshadows Orsino's fickleness when it comes to music which, in turn, represents love. Of course, later in the play, Orsino is shown to be truly fickle when it comes to love. As soon as he discovers that Cesario is actually Viola's wife, he instantly forgets all the passion he had for Olivia and marries Viola. Another part of Orsino's opening speech that shows a piece of the future plot is the part where he talks about love being "receives like the sea" (11). This can be interpreted as showing that love will come by sea. In the next scene, Viola appears in Illyria after a shipwreck. Sebastian, although Shakespeare does not say so at the time, also comes on the scene because of the same shipwreck. Shakespeare predicts, very subtly, that these are...... middle of paper ...... one of the early antics of the play to seduce Olivia and succeed for Orsino and Viola's initial plan at the beginning does not flourish. This sentence concludes the part of Feste's song in which he gives a summary of the piece. The last two stanzas address the audience and Feste thanks them. Shakespeare cleverly uses music and poetry to guide the audience through the play and give them a sense of what is to come, should the audience choose to pay close attention. However, it is not always clear what the song means, and depending on the character delivering the song or poem, it seems more comical than meaningful to the performance. By the end of the play, the audience has accepted that music and poetry are as much themes in the play as disguise and love, but that they are so thoroughly mixed that neither poetry nor love overshadow anything in the representation..