Remember back in March, when Sir Patrick Stewart’s reading of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 went viral on Twitter?
The next day the legendary actor and unsung hero of Twitter posted another video of himself, this time reading Sonnet 1.
“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,'” tweeted Stewart. “How about, ‘A sonnet a day keeps the doctor away?’ So, here we go: Sonnet 1.”
Well, guess what? He’s kept it going since then. And although Stewart hasn’t quite managed one every day, he’s still managed to work his way up to Sonnet 80 just in time for his 80th birthday on Monday.
“I had not realised that we were at a rather significant point in these sonnets. We just passed the halfway mark,” says Stewart in a video posted Sunday. “There are still 74 to go. But not only are we at the halfway mark, we are at the point of Sonnet 80. And that has special meaning for me, because tomorrow, I am 80.”
“Thank you for tuning in, and I hope you will do the same tomorrow, and I will try and make the sonnet as cheerful and birthday-like as possible,” he adds, before launching into the poem.
The rest of his readings can be found on his Twitter feed, along with the glorious news that he’s started work on a memoir.
You really can’t fault that man’s dedication during a global crisis.