They love to put that on t-shirts and stuff to prove Shakespeare loved music, blah, blah, blah, but they leave out the second part of the count’s sentence: “give me an excess of it, that, by surfeiting the appetite may sicken, and so die.”
What a love-sick Count Orsino is actually saying is that he wants to listen to “She’s Out of My Life” so many times that he gets sick of it and stops obsessing over Countess Olivia. That’s not exactly what’s implied when you take the first half of the sentence by itself. Furthermore, Orsino is talking, not Shakespeare. People are making Shakespeare say something he never meant. It’s kind of like when people quote Robert Frost writing, “Good fences make good neighbors,” and act like he meant it, when actually it’s a proverb that Frost disparaged in “Mending Wall”. So do people think that Shakespeare thought being rich was a sin just because in King John, Philip the Bastard says, “Well, whiles I am a beggar, I will rail and say there is no sin but to be rich” (2.6.593–94)? Of course not! That conclusion would be just as silly.
