The BBC’s Upstart Crow, created and scripted by Ben Elton, is a British situation comedy loosely based on the life and career of the early modern dramatist William Shakespeare (1564-1616). Beginning in 2016, as part of worldwide commemorations of the 400th anniversary of the writer’s death, the show has gone on to provide viewers with a more irreverent take on this most well-known of playwrights for a total of three series thus far, repeatedly inviting favourable comparisons to the 1980s historical comedy series Blackadder (1983-9), on which Elton also previously worked. On 21 December 2020, however, a special episode of the sitcom aired which altered its tone and style considerably. The article first considers how the episode’s tone and representation of social isolation sets it apart from the show’s established formula. It then considers how this episode seeks to relate its viewers’ experience of the contemporary Covid-19 pandemic to the experience of plague in early modern England. Finally, the article explores how the episode takes inspiration from Shakespeare’s own life experiences and, more specifically, from his Jacobean tragedy Macbeth in order to construct a poignant reflection of the social isolation experienced by so many of the episode’s anticipated audiences over the previous year.