This Above All To Thine Own

This is the culminating piece of advice Polonius gives his son Laertes in Act I, Scene 3 of Hamlet (c. 1600–1601), just before Laertes departs for France. The speech is a string of worldly maxims on money, friendship, and comportment. Scholars have long noted the irony: Polonius, who spies on his own son and uses his daughter Ophelia as a pawn, is himself conspicuously untrue to his own self. That the play's greatest hypocrite delivers one of Shakespeare's most cited pieces of wisdom is a characteristic Shakespearean joke.