Context The most influential writer in all of English literature, William Shakespeare was born in 1564 to a successful middle-class glove-maker in Stratford-upon-Avon, England. Shakespeare attended grammar school, but his formal education proceeded no further. In 1582 he married an older woman, A...

• The soliloquy begins with Hamlet's thoughts on how time is running by and he still hasn't done anything. He says:And spur my dull revenge! What is a man,If his chief good and market of his time (Hamlet IV.iv. 32-35) • In these lines Hamlet is thinking about all the time he has wasted i...