Hamlet: The Wisdom of Polonius The disadvantage of the practical man's world is that it breaks down and refuses to work, and then he discovers it, at the cost of enormous anguish and suffering, who has been working all the time on a theory, but a wrong theory; and he wishes he had thought a little more before it was too late. Gradually it becomes clear to a world that has always mocked philosophers that a society run along the lines of Polonius, in which every man is true to himself or to his own class, will not work in the long run, but will infallibly explode. with horrible ruin and burning, in chaos, and make way for a society that will be less selfish. In the play Hamlet, by William Shakespeare, Polonius proclaims: Be true to thyself, and it must follow, as night is day, thou shalt not be false to any man. This is often cited as a fine example of the noble wisdom of our sublime bard, and so on; while anyone who looks carefully at these lines can see that if our sublime bard had nothing wiser than this to say about the conduct of life, the less we say of his wisdom the better. In reality, of course, the lines make no sense, and Shakespeare was well aware that they did; he puts them into the mouth of a talkative old gentleman who spends most of his time talking nonsense. Hamlet himself - who obviously comes closer than anyone else to expressing Shakespeare's thoughts - calls Polonius a "tedious old fool", and it is clear that a dull old fool is exactly what Shakespeare is trying to portray. The rest of the speech, of which these famous lines are the conclusion, is made up in part of fragments of banal and superficial world... medium of paper... genre. To do this is to be a philosopher. There are not many philosophers; and the practical man does not regret that there are so few of them, because he is proud to belong, as he says, to a world of practice, not of mere theory. The disadvantage of the practical man's world is that he collapses and refuses to work, and then discovers, at the cost of enormous anguish and suffering, that he has been working all along on a theory, but a wrong theory; and he wishes he had thought a little more before it was too late. Gradually it becomes clear to a world that has always mocked philosophers that a society run along the lines of Polonius, in which every man is true to himself or to his own class, will not work in the long run, but will infallibly explode. with horrible ruin and burning, in chaos, and make way for a society that will be less selfish.