Neither a borrower, nor a lender be

Recently I was skimming through the Shakespearean drama Hamlet and had to set aside my scan reading abruptly to read carefully the haughty, if not trite, kernels of wisdom bestowed by Polonius, the father, on his hotheaded son Laertes. I reproduce the lines:

There ... my blessing with thee!
And these few precepts in thy memory
Look thou character. Give thy thoughts no tongue,
Nor any unproportion'd thought his act.
Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.
Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel;
But do not dull thy palm with entertainment
Of each new-hatch'd, unfledg'd comrade.  Beware
Of entrance to a quarrel but, being in,
Bear't that th' opposed may beware of thee.
Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice;
Take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgement.
Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,
But not express'd in fancy; rich, not gaudy;
For the apparel oft proclaims the man;
And they in France of the best rank and station
Are of a most select and generous chief in that.
Neither a borrower, nor a lender be;
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.
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.
Farewell; my blessing season this in thee!

Hamlet, Act I, Scene iii, LL 56-81

The father resorts to these sententious maxims to advise his son to desist from his intemperate pursuits. 

"Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy"

While referring to habit, did Shakespeare mean behaviour pattern or the attire? Either way it is quite apt. A gem of an aphorism. One's habits ought to be according to one's own affordability. Do not stretch beyond this. And what can I say about the following line: 

"Neither a borrower nor a lender be". 

There is wisdom in the old man's warnings, of course; but he repeats orthodox platitudes with unwonted self-satisfaction. Each line seems to be a stockpile of erudition. I am awestruck at the aptness of these pronouncements even centuries after they were written. Or did Shakespeare pen these for the sake of posterity?  

I've had a sense of déjà vu while reading. It was this sense that forced me to read the counsel carefully. Even my own Polonius had resorted to such subtle counsels. And probably vexed with the maverick ways of his Laertes discarded the subtlety and chose the straighter one, and hit the nail right on the head, which only he can resort to straighten.


And learn did I a valuable lesson "Heed not these exhortations, life and providence would teach"  of course, much before I read these lines.