Star Trek’s Patrick Stewart Is Reading Shakespeare Online for Fans During Coronavirus Pandemic

Much of the world is finding itself stuck at home in self-quarantine amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Star Trek: Picard star Patrick Stewart is trying to do something small to help lift people’s spirits. Before he was Captain Jean-Luc Picard, Stewart was best known as a Shakespearian actor. He returned to those roots on Saturday when he posted a video to Twitter of himself reciting Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116. Stewart received a strong response to the video. He returned to Twitter on Sunday to apply some wisdom from his mother to the current crisis. “I was delighted by the response to yesterday’s posting of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116, and it has led me to undertake what follows…” he tweeted.

“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.”

From there, he goes on to recite Sonnet 1 and it seems he plans to keep on reciting the sonnets for as long as this quarantine continues. You can watch below:

This week, Star Trek: Picard will release its first season finale. The episode will resolve the issue of a fleet of 218 Romulan warbirds heading towards the planet where Data’s children and their community of synthetics reside.

Ahead of the show’s premiere, ComicBook.com spoke to Stewart about how his return to the role of Jean-Luc Picard compares to his return as Professor X in Logan. “I am reluctant to make comparisons because when I cited Logan it was still a very, very fresh experience for me,” Stewart said, “and I only used it to enforce to the people I was talking to – Alex [Kurtzman] and Michael [Chabon] and Akiva [Goldsman] – that it was very important that our starting off point was not the day that I walked off the Enterprise say, but other things, more complicated things, things that he is perhaps badly responsible for, not doing his job properly, not being effective, and also letting pride control his actions and self-regard control his actions, which is very un-Picard-like but is truthful in this situation.”

Will you be keeping up with Stewart’s sonnets? Let us know in the comments. New episodes of Star Trek: Picard stream Thursdays on CBS All Access.