“If music be the food of love, play on” (1.1.1) is one of the most famous opening lines from a Shakespearean play, and it belongs to one of the comedies often considered to be Shakespeare’s finest, Twelfth Night. The play was probably written in the early years of the seventeenth century, between 1600 and 1602, but it was not published until 1623 with the printing of the First Folio. The lack of a quarto edition for the play, together with the remarkably high quality of its folio version (which contains very few typesetter errors), make Twelfth Night a particularly established and authoritative text, both for academic study and for staging and performance. The folio text is believed to have come from a prompt book, which means that the version that we have access to today...
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Citation: Venegas Meza, Josefina. "Twelfth Night". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 03 July 2020 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=8488, accessed 09 June 2026.]
