Books and television have always proven to be wonderful escapes from reality. In quarantine, a couple of actors have brought the two worlds together.
Jennifer Ehle, who played Elizabeth Bennet on the 1995 BBC Pride and Prejudice series, has taken to YouTube to read snippets of the book.
If you’d like to read along with her, the first installment is here:
Similarly, Sir Patrick Stewart committed to reading one of Shakespeare’s sonnets a day as we continue to physically distance.
As he put it: “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’?
Here is Sir Patrick’s most recent offering. It has a bonus cat in it!
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Well Sir Pat, sonnets and English literature won’t cure COVID-19. But they might cure boredom — and give us a brief but welcome distraction from what’s going on in the real world.
You can listen to Pride and Prejudice on Jennifer’s YouTube channel, and Shakespeare’s sonnets on Sir Patrick’s Instagram.
We might not be as eloquent as Austen and Shakespeare, but we’ve pulled together a pretty substantial volume of COVID-19 resources that you can find here!
Photo by Elaine Howlin on Unsplash.
