What do we mean when we say it today?
These days, most of the time we hear people say "to thine ownself be true," they are speaking literally. And it seems like pretty good advice, especially for people heading off to college, taking a new job, or making big changes in their lives. It's important to remember to be yourself and not change for other people.
This advice has been used as a self-help slogan. It's put on greeting cards, wall art, and more recently, used in a lot of tattoos. People are proclaiming to the world: we want to be who we are, without anyone else defining us. And that's a good thing.
But we can't help wondering if this catchy advice is really just the stuff of cliché greeting cards printed with insufferably cheesy little poems. The kind of overwrought "roses are red, violets are blue" couplets that are easy to make up on the spot. But then again, isn't that totally in line with how the quote was originally used?
Think about it. Polonius is a verbose, out of touch dad with more than a slogan or two of advice to pass along to his son. It's got corny and cliché written all over it. So next time you see a greeting card or necklace with "to thine ownself be true" written on it, just think: that was exactly the way our boy Shakespeare intended it to be used—with a heaping helping of irony.