If anyone was going to pass their time in lockdown by reciting Shakespeare's sonnets, it's obviously Patrick Stewart.
While you might know him as Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the USS Enterprise, or Professor Charles Xavier of the X-Men, Patrick Stewart is an accomplished Shakespearean actor, having won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Supporting Actor twice, once for 'Hamlet' and the other for 'Antony and Cleopatra'.
So, while 'Picard' and just about every TV show, theatre production and everything else is on shutdown at the minute, Patrick Stewart has been occupying his time by reciting sonnets on his Twitter. He started off on Saturday by reading Sonnet 116, and as of today, he's reading one a day every day and has committed to doing so until we're all out of this.
— Patrick Stewart (@SirPatStew) March 21, 2020
2. When I was a child in the 1940s, my mother would cut up slices of fruit for me (there wasn't much) and as she put it in front of me she would say, "An apple a day keeps the doctor away." How about, “A sonnet a day keeps the doctor away”? So...here we go: Sonnet 1. pic.twitter.com/kDoMNhdqcI
— Patrick Stewart (@SirPatStew) March 22, 2020
Sonnet 2. This is one of my favorites. #ASonnetADay pic.twitter.com/aQBzrsETKv
— Patrick Stewart (@SirPatStew) March 23, 2020
Granted, Patrick Stewart could read a page of the telephone book (younger people, ask your parents what this is) and we'd still tune in religiously, every day, to hear Captain Picard. The man's got a voice like a finely tuned piano, comforting and soft but completely capable of going full tilt whenever needed.
Here's hoping he gets to Sonnet 130 before this is all over, as Alan Rickman's reading of it is pretty damn special.
