This Argentinian newscaster had a Bard day at work.
Noelia Novillo of TV Canal 26 likely didn’t know whether to be or not to be ashamed after reporting that William Shakespeare — “one of the most important writers in the English language” — died five months after getting the COVID-19 vaccine, the Guardian reported.
In what has been described as a comedy of errors, Novillo confused The Bard, who died in 1616, with an 81-year-old Briton of the same name, William “Bill” Shakespeare.
The latter, a former Rolls-Royce employee and the second person in the world to receive Pfizer’s shot outside of a clinical trial, died Thursday of a stroke unrelated to the vaccine, according to the news outlet.
“We’ve got news that has stunned all of us given the greatness of this man,” Novillo said during her newscast, according to a translation from Spanish by the Guardian.
“We’re talking about William Shakespeare and his death. We’ll let you know how and why it happened,” she said.
“As we all know, he’s one of the most important writers in the English language — for me the master. Here he is. He was the first man to get the coronavirus vaccine. He’s died in England at the age of 81,” Novillo added.
She later tried to clean up her mess by claiming she had been misunderstood reporting about the English playwright’s namesake.
“Over the past few hours, as I’m sure you will have seen, a report has gone viral. I actually knew what I was saying to people, just like I always do,” Novillo said Friday, the Guardian reported.
“I expressed myself badly; I missed out a full stop, a comma, some brackets. I wanted to clear up something that was very unclear, and of course, people misinterpreted it,” she said.
But in Shakespeare’s famous words, “the lady doth protest too much,” as many noted on social media.
“There were only a few years between them,” one Twitter user quipped.
“An error of just four centuries,” another person said, the Telegraph reported.
Pictures of Bill Shakespeare receiving his vaccination made the front page of several newspapers at the time, including The Post, which used the headline “Taming of the Flu.”