Weekend self-care open thread: Sir Patrick Stewart reads Shakespeare's Sonnets

Sir Patrick Stewart by Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0

The year 2020. The world is in the grips of a pandemic, the likes it hadn't experienced since the misnamed Spanish Flu of 1918-1920. City streets were deserted. Businesses were shuttering. People were trapped in their homes. It was an apocalypse as foretold by our speculative artists.

But, at least for that first year of the Covid pandemic, we rose to the occasion. We honored frontline healthcare workers. We followed directions from health authorities. We looked out for each other.

And our artists also rose to the occasion. YouTube was filled with creatives lending their talents to soothe a world gone mad, unsure of where this pandemic would lead.

My love for Sir Patrick Stewart was cemented when I first saw him on television. Not in Star Trek: The Next Generation, but in I, Claudius, playing the evil, scheming Lucius Aelius Sejanus, the Roman equestrian with pretensions to the purple, who soon met his fate for flying too close to the sun.

Sir Patrick is everything an artist should be: empathetic, open to the world, fully human. I am an unalloyed fanboy, and not ashamed to admit it.

During the worst of the pandemic, he posted on YouTube videos of himself reading each of William Shakespeare's Sonnets. I watched them all, every one of them a revelation. His series, A Sonnet A Day, was one of the many pieces of art which helped get me through what had already been a difficult year beginning in 2019.

For our weekend self-care, the inestimable Sir Patrick Stewart and his lodestar, the Bard of Stratford-Upon-Avon.

You can find all of his readings here.

As always, dear friends, be ever excellent to yourselves and those around you. 

***

Like what you're reading? Never miss another post! Get notified via email here.

Donate at the link below to keep us going.