Perchance to Choke

       Senior year English class was World Literature, and the advanced placement class was the same except perhaps just a tad more intense. And this memory is a rewriting of the story-a-day version from 2009.

         Everyone knew long before actually arriving at 12^th grade English that we would be studying Hamlet and we would be required to memorize Hamlet's famous To be or not to be soliloquy. Would we have to get up in front of the class and deliver the speech in order to prove we had memorized it? Thank goodness, no. Instead, on the assigned day, we would be writing out the soliloquy, word for word and handing it in.

          On our very first day of 12^th grade, walking into English class, Roy said that he had spent the summer memorizing the speech. He already knew the whole thing! Roy was proud of this accomplishment. I was kind of surprised – because you know, the assignment was not a done deal. Things could happen and assignments can get changed. Why would someone expend brain cells on something that might not come to pass? But Roy went ahead and memorized To be or not to be – and the rest of us still had that big task ahead of us.

          Well, the curriculum did not magically change over the summer, and the assignment came very early in the school year. Soon everyone except Roy was sweating the memorization of Hamlet's famous speech. Roy smiled and offered assistance. Did anyone want to practice with him? We all wished we could be as sure of our mastering of the soliloquy as Roy was.

          The day of the test, we all wrote out the speech on clean sheets of paper to the best of our ability. Almost everyone received a perfect score.

          Roy did not.

          There are two places in the speech that have the phrase “To die, to sleep...” - the first time and the second all in the space of just a few words - “to die, to sleep; No more; and by a sleep to say we end the heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to 'tis a consummation Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep; To sleep, perchance to dream. Ay there's the rub...”

          When Roy wrote out the speech on his clean sheet of paper and got to the phrase “to die, to sleep” he went right into the “perchance to dream” completely skipping the words in between the first “to die, to sleep” and the second “to die, to sleep”! Oh my gosh! I don't know if Roy had been practicing the speech incorrectly – why didn't any of us offer to practice with him? Or if it was a slip up just when he was writing it for the test. But that poor guy! Roy had been the one who took the assignment the most seriously, and he was the one who ended up making the biggest error!

           There is not a lesson to be learned from this story, I don't think – it is just something that happened that I have never forgotten. And it is a cool speech whether you skip the words between the To die, to sleeps or not!

294 20151021 Perchance to Choke!