Hamlet's wisdom

In Shakespeare’s Scholars: Three Lessons from the Liberal Arts, Sean Keilen examines three plays with scholars as protagonists—Love’s Labor’s Lost, Hamlet, and The Tempest, tracing these characters’ arduous paths to self-knowledge and meaningful connection with others. In each play, Keilen finds important lessons about humility, wisdom, and self-knowledge.

In Hamlet, the prodigiously intelligent Prince of Denmark retreats to the solitude of his own thoughts, with tragic results. Keilen, in the excerpt below from the section on Hamlet, explores one of the play’s more comic scenes, Polonius’ advice to his son Laertes: “Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar”; “Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice”; “Neither a borrower nor a lender be.” But it turns out that Shakespeare’s audiences actually took Polonius’s guidance quite seriously as did most audiences until very recently.

Hamlet’s second scene of scholarship, in which Shakespeare brings Polonius into focus as a foil for Hamlet’s refusal of wisdom, turns on Polonius’s injunction to his son, Laertes: “these few precepts in thy memory / Look thou character” (1.3.57–58). In a style that is reminiscent of Proverbs and other Old Testament wisdom books, the “precepts” that follow are almost entirely in the imperative mood, and they are organized paratactically. Their style and manner of delivery might convey pedantry or pomposity; Polonius has often been read and played that way. Or perhaps, being given to long-windedness, he is trying here to be brief, simply because Laertes’s ship is waiting. But whatever the stylistic and theatrical effect of the maxims proffered by Polonius, they also have an intention—and understanding that intention is central to how we judge Hamlet’s turn away from wisdom after hearing what the Ghost has to say.

Polonius’s lesson includes a few of Shakespeare’s most memorable verses, lines that escaped from the play’s enclosure long ago and became commonplaces in their own right: “Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar”; “Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice”; “Neither a borrower nor a lender be” (1.3.61, 67, 74). Earlier generations cherished these lines as “golden precepts,” and for nearly four centuries, Hamlet’s critics, editors, and scholars followed suit, carefully distinguishing between Polonius’s manner and his message. Original audiences may have roared with laughter at the actor playing Polonius, but the publisher of the first quarto of Hamlet (1603) alerted readers to the precepts by flagging them with inverted commas, a cue to write them down and remember them. In Shakespeare’s culture, these “conventional precepts [would have seemed] entirely appropriate to Polonius as a man of experience,” a man who was generous to bestow such wisdom, while Laertes would be ungrateful and undutiful not to accept it.

To appreciate how much respect was accorded to commonplace wisdom, consider the wildly popular compendium A Treatise of Morall Philosophie (1567), which ran to more than twenty editions between 1547 and 1631. Its compiler and editor, Thomas Palfreyman, introduced his work by explaining that it was not for “any preferment, praise, or glory” that he undertook to gather, organize, and publish the volume’s “good sayings and godly counsels.” Rather, it was because “the gifts of the spirit of God are given to every man to no other use but to edify withal, lovingly to help one another, to comfort and encourage one another, and every man to rejoice at another’s well doing.” Doubtless, Palfreyman hoped for commercial success, but it does not follow that he feigned either his faith in commonplaces or his charity toward readers. Nor should we suspect that he was deluded about the hopes people placed in his book, or their appreciation of its contents.

Shakespeare’s interpreters retained this basic faith in commonplace wisdom until quite recently, and for several centuries the advice conferred by Polonius here was highly esteemed, despite frequent lambasting of his character. The author of the first essay on Hamlet (1736) argued that it is “evident by the whole Tenour of Polonius’s Behaviour … that he is intended to represent some Buffoonish Statesman”—but the same author also concluded, on the evidence of the “grave and excellent Instructions” to Laertes, that Shakespeare was “too good a Judge of Nature to Design any Thing Comick or Buffoonish upon so solemn an Occasion as that of a Son’s taking leave of his Father.” In the next century, Samuel Taylor Coleridge said that Polonius is “a man of maxims,” adding that a “man of maxims only is like a Cyclops with one eye and that eye placed in the back of the head.” Yet Coleridge judged Polonius to be “admirable” when “descanting on matters of past experience, as in that excellent speech to Laertes.” In his notes on Shakespeare’s tragedies, Coleridge expanded on that argument, writing that “[in] the great ever-recurring dangers and duties of life, where to distinguish the fit objects for the applications of the maxims collected by experience of a long life requires no fineness of tact, as in the admonitions to his son and daughter, Polonius is always made respectable.” Even the twentieth century—at least for a time—saw some value in recalling past lessons. In 1946, Logan Pearsall Smith could confidently gesture to the contrast between “shallow-pated Polonius” and “the profound wisdom” he imparts to his son. As recently as 1982, Harold Jenkins, the editor of the Arden Hamlet (second series), agreed that it is “a mistake to suppose [the precepts] are meant to make [Polonius] seem ridiculous.”

Over the past half-century, however, attitudes toward the wisdom tradition have changed: the speech of Polonius to Laertes is anything but admired. Academic readers may be the most likely to view its sententiousness in the way Hamlet regards Polonius himself: as “foolish” and “prating” (3.4.215). And perhaps contemporary scholars are bound to display a bias against taking commonplace truths seriously when their own function, as readers, is to advance a discipline’s frontiers. But as even my cursory review of past criticism shows, scholars and directors in the modern era who find the speech trite and risible are defying a long tradition of editors and critics who held that we may and should distinguish between the folly of Polonius’s behavior and the wisdom of his sayings.

What if we were instead to read this speech as lovers and seekers of wisdom? We might discover that its theme is friendship, specifically how one ought to behave so as to make friends and keep them, and how to be worthy of friendship. At the root of the speech lies Cicero’s lex amicitiae: the principle that one should ask of and do for one’s friends only what is honorable and in that way be honorable oneself. When John Heywood brought his own collection of commonplace wisdom into print in 1546, as a dialogue between friends, he wrote that he aimed “not to teach, but to touch.” That is how I view Polonius’s prudential maxims: not as commands but as words that aim to leave an impression. “My blessing season this in thee,” he says to Laertes as they part, repeating the word he used to open the speech (1.3.57, 80; my italics). Notably, this scholar-father’s theme is nothing like the Ghost’s message for Hamlet in act 1, scene 5, a scene that also portrays a father imparting a lesson and a son receiving instructions. Rather than friendship and blessing, what the Ghost confers on Hamlet is an obligation: the debt that blood owes to blood under the lex talionis. Polonius employs the imperative mood to bestow a flexible and nonbinding legacy on Laertes, as he releases him to his independence and prosperity as a man. In sharp contrast, the Ghost will use it to summon Hamlet to a rigid, violent understanding of his duty as a son to retaliate for a murder.

Recent studies of commonplacing in Shakespeare’s era are highly instructive, but they mostly treat it as a technology—focusing selectively on its practical use to organize knowledge and to furnish scholars with examples, images, and phrases for compositions—rather than as a vehicle for wisdom. It is true that commonplace books were indispensable instruments for information retrieval in a culture that encouraged the imitation of great models and inherited conventions. But as the example of Palfreyman shows, late sixteenth-century readers also valued wise sayings as philanthropic resources, a bulwark against the adversity and misfortune they understood to be inherent in their fallen world. They are not meant to dictate the decisions we make at moments of crisis, but rather to point out that there many different paths to follow through life. From this perspective, the wisdom that Polonius offers here is precious, no matter how many other things in the play he gets grievously wrong or how dubious his motives can be. To assume that his human imperfection somehow proves the fruitlessness of the wise sayings that he cherishes is seriously to misunderstand how wisdom is fitted, as a therapy, to the frailty of the human condition. And it is to misunderstand the human condition itself. Likewise, the fact that Claudius will confess in the prayer scene to having murdered his brother—thus confirming the Ghost’s main charge against him—does not prove that Hamlet is right to renounce commonplace wisdom in act 1, scene 5. For such wisdom to fail us in a specific context is one thing; for it to be meaningless in general is another.

Seeing how Polonius cleaves to wisdom, whereas Hamlet casts off this equipment for living, tells us much about their differences as readers; it says nothing about the value of what is preserved or lost. To fathom Hamlet’s tragedy fully, I believe we must resist the easy temptation to make fun of commonplace wisdom, and ask instead what Hamlet is giving up when he repudiates it. One way of answering this question is to note that sixteenth-century humanists and their students followed Cicero and Seneca in imagining books as companions, and reading as a lifelike relationship affording opportunities for self-knowledge. The first edition of Erasmus’s Adagia in 1500 indelibly associated commonplaces with friendship, opening with the adage “Amicorum communia omnia”: “Between friends all is common.” And among these “friends” were books themselves: In a letter written on the eve of the publication of the Adages, Erasmus praised these “friends” with whom he had been spending so much of his time, because they “do not flatter, feign nothing, keep back nothing, freely tell you of your faults, and take no man’s character away.” In forsaking his commonplace book, and the vast library of diverse perspectives on the human condition that stands behind it, Hamlet is forsaking an honest conversation with friends—and, indeed, after hearing what the Ghost says, he swears Horatio and the soldiers to silence.

The commonplaces gleaned from books are friendly in the sense that they can help us attain self-knowledge—the cornerstone of freedom and a virtuous life according to ancient writers. Francis Bacon was expanding on an oft-quoted passage in Aristotle when he remarked on the “gross errors and extreme absurdities many … do commit for want of a friend to tell them of them.” In this respect the friendship of books, as conceived by Erasmus, resembles that of people. Both can make us wiser in much the same ways; reading, after all, is ultimately “an exchange between people, an exchange whose dynamics remind us that we were created as limited human beings who are enriched by fellowship with others.” Books, furthermore, are distinctive in how they can deepen our sense of the pluralism of human values and experiences across time. On this view, what Hamlet rejects with his commonplace book is a condition of possibility for attaining self-knowledge: a condition that for centuries was experienced and described as friendship.

About the author

Sean Keilen is professor of literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he also directs Shakespeare Workshop, a research center that promotes Shakespeare scholarship, community engagement, and theatrical performance. He is author of Vulgar Eloquence: On the Renaissance Invention of English Literature and the coeditor of Shakespeare: The Critical Complex and The Routledge Research Companion to Shakespeare and Classical Literature. He is also head of dramaturgy at Santa Cruz Shakespeare, a longstanding professional theater company.