In 1989 Derek Walcott flew to London where he received the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, the first for a Commonwealth citizen. During his conversation with the Queen he mentioned an American penchant for speaking Shakespearean verse. “Ma’am,” he said, “you know Sly Stallone. Well, his version of Hamlet goes, `To be or what.'” The Queen, says Walcott, “cracked up.”
(Bruce King, Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life, 2000)
Derek Walcott
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