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This above all, to thine own self be true. And it must follow, as the night the day. Thou canst not then be false to any man.
With this exhortation, Shakespeare, in Hamlet, had Polonius, the Lord Chamberlain of Denmark, send his son, Laertes, off to seek his destiny. Polonius, sometimes seen as a symbol of the doddering father, too glib with clichés, was subsequently killed by Hamlet as a “rat” sneaking behind the curtains.
Polonius' fate as a champion of the importance of the self is reminiscent of the much earlier Greek myth of Narcissus, a beautiful youth who was bewitched into falling in love with his own reflection in a fountain, thinking it was “the presiding nymph of the place.”1 Narcissus “gradually pined away for love of this unattainable spirit” and jumped into the fountain where he died. The ill-fated youth thus came to symbolize the plight of those addicted to self-love, which was believed to lead to self-destruction. The idea of narcissism has been colored by this somber myth ever since. So Shakespeare, in the Renaissance revival of Greco-Roman values, embodied the ambivalence about the prizing of the self in the ill-fated father figure of Polonius.
Christianity continued to emphasize the Greco-Roman value of self-abnegation, with selfishness easily slipping into the polar opposite of a vice. Yet competitiveness, which certainly implies self-advancement, was simultaneously encouraged in Greece and then in pagan and Christian Rome; religious wars, for example, eventuated in the precarious cultural dominated by power struggles among multinational corporate giants.