Patrick Stewart soothes coronavirus fears with a Shakespeare sonnet a day on Twitter

Patrick Stewart is employing his classical acting training to sooth and calm panic over the spreading coronavirus outbreak.

The thespian icon dropped his first video onto Twitter on Saturday, broadcasting Shakespeare's Sonnet 116 to his 3.3 million social media followers.

Then on Sunday, because of the huge uptake, he went all the way back to the Bard's Sonnet 1, and on Monday read Sonnet 2, one of his favourites.

He wrote: “I was delighted by the response to yesterday's posting of Shakespeare's Sonnet 116, and it has led me to undertake what follows.

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“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.”

Stewart's fellow Star Trek alumnus William Shatner is also using his 2.5 million Twitter reach to cheer up fans in these testing times.

Read more: Tom Hanks is ‘feeling better’ in latest virus update

The former Captain James T. Kirk is providing daily Captain's Log updates for fans of his “self-imposed isolation”.

Meanwhile, those fans of both Shakespeare and Star Trek, and who are now on a similar self-imposed lockdown, can now binge Stewart's spin-off series Picard on Amazon Prime Video.