Patrick Stewart's Shakespearean sonnet readings shine light during crisis

When the time comes to tell our grandkids about the pandemic of 2020, there will be no shortage of stories.

It was scary. Everything shut down, and tens of thousands died. People were so panicked, you couldn’t find toilet paper or flour on store shelves. Schools closed.

All you could do was try to keep your family healthy and make the best of a trying and strange circumstance.

The little things help in times like this. And beloved actor Patrick Stewart has been doing his part to brighten days during the global crisis.

After posting on social media a reading of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 in his smooth baritone on March 21 — the video has 57,900 likes and 11,700 shares on Twitter — Stewart began posting regular readings of the Bard’s mostly-14-line poems. They’ve given thousands something, however small, to look forward to each day.

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

It’s a fitting choice of subject matter. Stewart is best known in popular culture as Capt. Jean-Luc Picard on “Star Trek: The Next Generation” and its associated movies, as well as Professor Charles Xavier — alongside Ian McKellen’s Magneto — in several “X-Men” films. But he began as a stage actor, joined the Royal Shakespeare Company and made his first Broadway appearance in 1971 in Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” according to britannica.com.

Despite his popular success, “he never stopped performing Shakespeare,” playing in “The Tempest,” “Othello,” “Macbeth,” and “Hamlet.”

In his most recent post Tuesday, Stewart, who was knighted in 2009, tackles Sonnet 61 of Shakespeare’s 154-poem quarto — so named because each page is a quarter of the size of a full sheet — published in 1609.

Sonnet 61. #ASonnetADay pic.twitter.com/Vq87dZoAZa

— Patrick Stewart (@SirPatStew) May 19, 2020

Stewart reads:

O, no! thy love, though much, is not so great:

It is my love that keeps mine eye awake;

Mine own true love that doth my rest defeat,

To play the watchman ever for thy sake

“Little bit of bitterness in that, seems to me,” he observes. “Perhaps even angry. Well, love isn’t always sweet dreams, is it?”

The poems are “designed to commemorate the poet’s beloved for all eternity,” writes Hannah Crawforth, a senior lecturer in Early Modern Literature at King’s College, London, though she warns against reading them as biographical.

They include the famous Sonnet 18, which begins:

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate

Shakespeare’s sonnets were innovative, Crawforth writes, taking the poems from the traditional octave (eight lines) and sestet (six lines) configuration to 12 lines, followed by a concluding couplet (two lines).

“The sonnet is one of the smallest, most compact poetic forms, just 14 lines of tightly rhymed verse, but Shakespeare shows that it is capable of encompassing the most profound range of human experience and emotion,” Crawforth writes.

In a recent post, Jonathan Frakes, who plays Capt. Picard’s first officer, William T. Riker, in “Star Trek,” joins Stewart — with proper social distancing — to read Sonnet 57. Frakes reprises the role with Stewart in this year’s “Star Trek: Picard,” on CBS All Access.

Pleased to share that we have our first guest sonneteer today. Socially distant yet always a close friend, @jonathansfrakes performs Sonnet 57. #ASonnetADay pic.twitter.com/DNFiC5Qr2T

— Patrick Stewart (@SirPatStew) May 16, 2020

You can follow Stewart’s daily journey through the sonnets on Twitter or Instagram. His handle is @sirpatstew.