Good Advice on Leaving Home in the Romances

Summary

The topic of ‘youth’ suggests a natural connection with good advice: the older generation seem to find it irresistible to advise the young. In romances, the giving of advice often takes a very specific form. The young person – most often male, and usually the hero too – has just reached the point where he is about to leave his own family, the familiar society in which he has been brought up. At the very moment at which he reaches the threshold, he is stopped and given what sometimes amounts to several pages of good advice on how to conduct himself in the outside world. The precision of the convention can be seen with particular clarity in a late but thoroughly familiar example: Polonius’s advice to the departing Laertes in Hamlet. The way in which the giving of advice disrupts the schedule for departure is here made explicit to the point of parody:

Yet here, Laertes! Aboard, aboard, for shame,

The wind sits in the shoulder of your sail,

And you are stayed for. I.iii.55–7

But despite this hurry, Polonius still insists on giving his son ‘these few precepts in thy memory’, which indeed make up one of the longer speeches of the play. As advice goes, Polonius’s is not at all bad: it amounts to a fairly comprehensive economic, social and moral survival kit for a young gentleman: don’t borrow or lend money; instructions on dress codes; ‘to thine own self be true’. As such, it constitutes a nice mix of the pragmatic and the ideal. Just the same kind of pattern is found extensively in romances, and especially in late romances.

The Hamlet example is also a reminder, however, that the giving of advice is not as straightforward a topos as it might appear at first sight. It is very rare, in fact, for there not to be something odd about it. In this instance, the whole episode invites the basic question of why the passage exists at all. Why, so far as Polonius is concerned, should he hold up the ship? Why, even more pressingly, should Shakespeare hold up the action, for a passage that appears completely irrelevant to the play?