Hamlet: The Wisdom of Polonius Essay -- GCSE Coursework Shakespeare Ha

Hamlet The Wisdom of Polonius The blemish of the practical earths world is that it breaks dget, and refuses to work, and thusly he finds out, at the cost of vast distress and suffering, that he has been on the job(p) on a theory every last(predicate) the time, but a harm theory and he wishes he had through with(p) a little more than thinking before it was too late. step by step it is becoming plain to a world which has always scoffed at the philosophers that a society happen on the lines of Polonius, every man being aline to himself or to his own class, entrust not in the long run work, but will infallibly explode, with exorbitant ruin and combustion, into chaos, and make way for a society which shall be little selfish. In the play, Hamlet, by William Shakespe atomic number 18, Polonius proclaims To thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to all man. This is often cited as a fine example of the noble sapience of our sublime bard, and so forth whereas any one who looks carefully at these lines can see that if our sublime bard had nothing wiser than this to say approximately the conduct of life, the less we talk about his wisdom the better. As a matter of fact, of course, the lines are nonsense, and Shakespeare was well aware that they are nonsense he puts them in the mouth of a garrulous old gentleman who spends almost of his time talking nonsense. Hamlet himself - who obviously comes nearer than anybody else to speaking Shakespeares own mind - calls Polonius a airy old fool, and it is plain that a tedious 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 partly of bits of cheap and shallow worldly... ...kind. To do that is to be a philosopher. There are not many philosophersand the practical man is not sorry there are so few, for he is royal of belonging, as he says, to a world of practice, not of mere theory. The disadvantage of the practical mans world is that it breaks down, and refuses to work, and then he finds out, at the cost of enormous distress and suffering, that he has been working on a theory all the time, but a wrong theory and he wishes he had done a little more thinking before it was too late. Gradually it is becoming plain to a world which has always scoffed at the philosophers that a society run on the lines of Polonius, every man being true to himself or to his own class, will not in the long run work, but will infallibly explode, with hideous ruin and combustion, into chaos, and make way for a society which shall be less selfish.