I can think of nothing more Patrick Stewart than Patrick Stewart soliloquizing the internet with Shakespearean verse from the comfort of his own home. As a man in at-risk demographic amidst the coronavirus pandemic, the Star Trek star is in quarantine, and like millions around the world is probably finding that he’s a little bored. So, to liven up the drudgery, he’s took to Twitter to read Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116, and (of course) got a terrific response.
Today, he’s given the world a second reading, this time with Sonnet 1, and you can check it out for yourself in the tweet below:
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
One imagines this will become a regular thing. We’ve got some weeks of home-living to go before the virus has been and gone, after all, and I can think of worse ways to pass the time than Bill Shakespeare read by one of the great actors of our generation. Not that I know anything about Shakespeare, mind you, as years of English literature lessons have regrettably gone in one ear and out the other. Perhaps that’s a quarantine hobby for me to pick up.
If Shakey isn’t your style, but you want more Patrick Stewart, the series finale of Star Trek: Picard will air this Thursday on CBS All Access. Cos you can’t get enough of the Stew. There’s gonna be a Patattack all up in your face. Pat Stew is coming for you. Sorry, I’m rambling at this point.
Drop a comment if you, like the rest of the internet, are a professional epidemiologist and have serious suggestions to make about the approach of Western governments to tackling the pandemic. Alternatively, you could just appreciate Star Trek’s greatest thespian giving it some welly from behind closed doors. The virus will not stop or subdue the indomitable Patrick Stewart, that’s for sure.