Patrick Stewart is well known for playing Captain Jean Luc Picard on Star Trek: The Next Generation and its spin-off Star Trek: Picard, as well as playing Professor X in the X-Men series of films, but he is also a well known Shakespearean actor. While most of the world is in isolation due to the Covid-19 virus and looking for ways to keep themselves entertained, Stewart has decided to give them another things to look forward to. He’s set to post a new reading of a Shakespeare sonnet every day until the pandemic crisis is over.

For his first video, which he posted on Saturday, Stewart read Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnet 116’ (‘Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, but bears it out even to the edge of doom’). The close to two minute video got over 50,000 likes and over 10,000 retweets. After seeing the response to the video, Stewart later posted “1. I was delighted by the response to yesterday’s posting of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116, and it has led me to undertake what follows… 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.”

Since then Stewart has continued reading one sonnet a day, and since there are 154 sonnets in the collection, he can continue on for almost five months. Hopefully it doesn’t come to that however, but once the pandemic is over we’d like to see him continue. 

You can watch Stewart’s performances on his Twitter feed here: https://twitter.com/SirPatStew .

pic.twitter.com/dA92uM4Hr3

— 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