“If music be the food of love” (1.1.1) – famously begins Orsino and plunges into a stream of digestion metaphors informed by the spirit of Galen's theory and, as some argue, by its highly “misogynistic humoral distinctions between men and women” (Schiffer 2011: 33), the latter incapable of whole-hearted and sustained affection. Indeed Orsino's later fortunes give little credit to his boastful assertions about his passion being “as hungry as the sea” and by far exceeding the short-lived female “appetite.” A similar conceit, though obviously devoid of misogynistic colouring, is evoked by Cleopatra who speaks clearly for all lovers: “music, moody food / Of us that trade in love” (2.5.1–2). Whoever else trades in love, the association of love and music does not belong to the world of plays only. To the contrary, it had been well rehearsed in Shakespeare's sonnets before any of his dramatic characters indulged in music to nourish their love.

The positioning of Sonnet VIII in the cycle, squeezed in-between the gruesome “Unlooked on diest, unless thou get the son” in the final line of Sonnet VII, and the equally disheartening opening inquiry of Sonnet IX: “Is it for fear to wet a widow's eye / That thou consum'st thyself in single life?”, confirms only what seems to be the central message of the poem: men should get married and beget children in their likeness. Notwithstanding this rather conventional counselling, the poem soon surprises with the variety and dynamics of imagery used to argue the point: