Shakespeare and the Covid-19 vaccine in the British and European news:

An analysis of partially filled constructions (PFCs) and snowclones

Abstract

This article presents an analysis of a restricted corpus of British, Italian, and other European news from different media (e.g., newspaper articles, blogs, social media, etc.) about William Shakespeare – an 81-year-old man from Warwickshire with the same name of the well-known Elizabethan playwright – and the Covid-19 vaccine. Mr. Shakespeare was the first man, second only to a 90-year-old Northern Irish woman named Margaret Keenan, to receive a dose of the vaccine in the United Kingdom on 8 December 2020 (he died on 25 May 2021 for reasons unrelated to the vaccine), and both British and Continental communication media did not miss the opportunity to capitalise on this piece of news as an advertising gimmick. Nevertheless, news about Mr. Shakespeare’s vaccination offers incredibly fertile ground for a linguistic analysis of puns and wordplay mainly about the titles of and famous quotes from the Bard’s plays, such as “The Gentleman of Corona” and “The Taming of the Flu”. Also resorting to the Coronavirus corpus, released in May 2020 on english-corpora.org (https://www.english-corpora.org/corona/), this paper argues that such puns and wordplay have a common structure, known in linguistic terms as partially filled constructions (PFCs). A particular kind of PFC, known as snowclones, is introduced and discussed, with special emphasis on the productivity of Hamlet’s “To be or not to be”, understood as a PFC, with the purpose of demonstrating its high productivity.