Genuine Shakespeare: the line belongs to Polonius, sending his son Laertes off to France in Hamlet, act 1, scene 3 (1.3.68–69 in the Folger text). The wording that circulates is a blend of the two early printings — the Second Quarto of 1604 reads “Those friends thou hast … grapple them unto thy soul,” while the 1623 First Folio reads “The friends thou hast … Grapple them to thy Soule.”
“Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel” William Shakespeare, Hamlet, act 1, scene 3 (Polonius to Laertes). Second Quarto, 1604: "Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, / Grapple them unto thy soul with hoops of steel." The 1623 First Folio reads "The friends thou hast … Grapple them to thy Soule, with hoopes of Steele." Verified via Quotle.info
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Provenance
The source, line by line
Work
Hamlet, act 1, scene 3
Speaker
Polonius, to his son Laertes
Early printings
Second Quarto, 1604 (some copies dated 1605); First Folio, 1623
Line reference
1.3.68–69 (Folger)
Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, / Grapple them unto thy soul with hoops of steel, / But do not dull thy palm with entertainment / Of each new-hatched, unfledged courage.
Polonius to Laertes
Quoted in the Second Quarto reading, modern spelling. The Folio differs at three points in these four lines: “The friends thou hast,” “to thy Soule,” and “vnhatch’t, vnfledg’d Comrade.”
Hamlet was printed in Shakespeare’s own time — the Second Quarto in 1604 (some copies dated 1605) and the First Folio in 1623, per the Folger’s account of the early texts ↗ — so the words themselves are far outside any copyright term in the United States. Note that individual modern scholarly editions carry their own editorial copyright in their apparatus and editorial choices; the Elizabethan wording quoted here does not.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
What actually goes wrong with this one
The credit to Shakespeare is correct — unusually, for a name this heavily counterfeited. What travels wrong is the wording, and the impression that the sentiment is Shakespeare’s own advice rather than a character’s.
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Wording“grapple them to thy soul” edition variant
The Second Quarto of 1604 reads “Grapple them unto thy soul with hoops of steel ↗.” The shorter “to thy soul” is the 1623 Folio’s reading ↗ — but the Folio also opens the couplet with “The friends thou hast,” not “Those.” The popular line takes the first half from one printing and the second from the other.
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Next line“each new-hatched, unfledged comrade” edition variant
VoiceShakespeare speaking in his own person mis-framed
The lines are a speech prefix away from being anyone’s personal creed: in the Folio scene they are assigned to Polonius, coaching Laertes as he leaves for France, in the same breath as “Neither a borrower, nor a lender be ↗.” Quoting the passage as Shakespeare’s advice on friendship silently promotes a character’s words to the author’s.
The scene is a room in Polonius’s house. Laertes is already late for his boat to France, and his father catches him at the door for one more round of advice — a rapid-fire bundle of maxims that has supplied English with several of its most-quoted lines at once. “Neither a borrower, nor a lender be” is in the same speech, and so is “This above all: to thine own self be true,” which Wikiquote places at lines 78–80 and assigns to Polonius ↗.
That matters for how the friendship line gets used. It is dramatic speech given to a courtier, not a sentence Shakespeare wrote in his own voice, and the character delivering it is the same one the play spends the rest of its length undercutting. The counsel is sound; the mouth it comes out of is part of the joke.
The line is genuine. Only its preposition is in dispute — and the dispute is between printers, not poets.
Why the wording depends on which printing you pick
Hamlet reached print three times in Shakespeare’s era and shortly after. The Internet Shakespeare Editions textual introduction ↗ dates the First Quarto to 1603, the Second Quarto to 1604 (some copies 1605), and the First Folio to 1623, and describes Q2 as having “the attested authority of having been printed from Shakespeare’s own manuscript,” while the Folio descends via a prompt-book and a scribal transcript and omits more than two hundred Q2 lines.
The 1603 quarto is the odd one out in more ways than wording: it calls the Polonius character “Corambis” ↗. The Folger, like most modern editions, prints “a text of the Second Quarto combined with as much of the First Folio as it has been possible to include,” per its introduction to the text ↗ — which is how a single line ends up with two defensible readings and one very popular hybrid.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1564–1616 · English playwright & poet · baptised 26 April 1564
Shakespeare was baptised in Stratford-upon-Avon on 26 April 1564 and died on 23 April 1616. Hamlet belongs to the run of plays written for the Globe after 1599, and it survives in three disagreeing early printings — a 1603 quarto, the “good” Second Quarto of 1604, and the 1623 First Folio. That disagreement is exactly why this famous line has two respectable wordings rather than one.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Primary source
William Shakespeare, Hamlet, act 1, scene 3, lines 68–69 (Folger reference). Quoted here in the Second Quarto reading (1604; some copies dated 1605) as transcribed in the Internet Shakespeare Editions modern Quarto 2 text; the First Folio of 1623 reads “The friends thou hast, and their adoption tride, / Grapple them to thy Soule, with hoopes of Steele.”
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel’?” Last verified 29 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/those-friends-thou-hast-and-their-adoption-tried-grapple/