Polonius is the character who says “Brevity is the soul of wit” in Shakespeare’s *Hamlet*.
He speaks the line in Act 2, Scene 2, while reporting to Claudius and Gertrude about Hamlet’s strange behaviour. The irony is immediate: Polonius announces that he will be brief, then wanders through a long, self-important explanation before finally delivering the famous phrase.
Polonius is Lord Chamberlain of Denmark and the father of Laertes and Ophelia. He presents himself as a wise adviser, giving Laertes a string of maxims before his departure and instructing the servant Reynaldo to spy on him. Yet his verbosity, meddling, and tendency to mistake appearances make him both comic and politically dangerous.
Readers sometimes remember the saying as general advice about concise writing rather than as dialogue from a play. In *Hamlet*, it is deliberately undercut by the speaker’s inability to practise it. Polonius later hides behind a curtain while spying on Hamlet and Gertrude; Hamlet mistakenly stabs him, setting off the chain of events that leads to Ophelia’s collapse and Laertes’ revenge.