Sir Patrick Stewart Calmly Reading Sonnets Will Ease Your Troubled Mind
"Patrick Stewart reciting Shakespeare is exactly what I didn’t know I needed right now."
The internet is a very chaotic place at the moment — everyone is heading online to seek out news and distraction, and it’s making everything very loud and crowded, but also somewhat comforting. We’re all in this together, after all.
And in amongst the horrifying videos of celebrities singing John Lennon and Liam Gallagher yelling “WASH YOUR HANDS YOU LITTLE FUCKERS” while singing ‘Supersonic’, is something very, very calming: Sir Patrick Stewart reading sonnets.
The acting legend posted a video to Twitter of him reading William Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnet 116’, and it quickly spread across the internet. Watch it for yourself, you’ll see why:
— Patrick Stewart (@SirPatStew) March 21, 2020
Needless to say, the wild hordes of Twitter poetry lovers lapped it up.
If you had asked me what I needed, I never would have said “Sir Patrick Stewart looking me in the eyes while performing Shakespeare.” But now that I have it, I realize it’s what I needed. https://t.co/Lcs0WLo7Of
— Kumail Nanjiani (@kumailn) March 22, 2020
Patrick Stewart reciting Shakespeare is exactly what I didn’t know I needed right now 💙 https://t.co/Ndo2RO6dp4
— Tiffany Beebe (@beebethl) March 23, 2020
dude you could read the back of a cereal box and it would be beautiful
— Lexitime (@Lexitime) March 21, 2020
Raise your hand if you’re an essential worker who saw this on their lunch break and it made you start to cry real hard in a kind of therapeutic way 🤚
— 🌲Kit 🛸🖖🌲 (@mollygrew) March 22, 2020
You can read the phone book and the world would be a better place.
— Rev. Rob Lee (@roblee4) March 22, 2020
Given the reaction, Stewart announced this morning that’d he’d read one sonnet a day, to keep isolation blues at bay…as it were.
” I was delighted by the response to yesterday’s posting of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116,” he told viewers. “And it has led me to undertake what follows.
“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”?”
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