2B or not 2B: The Bard gets a jab

Her birthday present came with the promise of a long life but her fame turned out to be short-lived. Moments after the spotlight shone over 90-year-old Margaret Keenan who became the first person in the world to receive a vaccine against Covid-19, fellow British citizen William Shakespeare, 82, stole her historic moment with his initials that bear an uncanny resemblance to the Bard, a British icon in world literature.  

William Shakespeare’s namesake became an internet sensation shortly after he was declared the second person in the world to receive the vaccine developed by Pfizer. The octogenarian brought the internet down when one of his nieces posted about him having an ‘86 per cent chance’ of belonging to the same family tree as that of the celebrated dramatist and author. 

One of the most popular references that went viral was a spin on the Hamletian dilemma brought alive by the famous soliloquy, “to be or not to be”, that brought out the pain of life and death in Hamlet, the Bard’s protagonist in his exemplary work by the same name. After Keenan was memed as patient 1A as the first recipient of the vaccine in the world, the internet was flooded with messages asking if the 82-year-old namesake was indeed “patient 2B or not 2B”. The coincidences do not end in the striking similarity of the name. The in-patient at the University Hospital Coventry who is addressed fondly as Bill by the kin is being treated at the county of Bard’s birth, Warwickshire.

Earlier, healthy secretary Matt Hancock broke down in tears when news about Shakespeare’s namesake getting the vaccine was broken to him by Piers Morgan, who was interviewing him on ITV’s Good Morning Britain. Hancock, when prodded by Morgan about becoming emotional, replied, “It has been such a tough year for so many people… and there’s William Shakespeare putting it so simply for everybody that we can get on with our lives.”

Incidentally, Shakespeare is known to have penned his most celebrated plays including, Macbeth, King Lear, and Antony and Cleopatra alongside Timon of Athens during the plagues that dotted his life since his birth in 1564 when the first of the plagues had barely receded. A second wave in 1592 led to the shuttering down of London theatres. His later work that would make him a household name would find shape during the plague of 1603 and a successive outbreak in 1610. To have his namesake and possibly a descendant receive one of the first drugs that cures a global pandemic is nothing but poetic justice to a sordid tale of tragedy and devastation, four centuries later.