Activate Joy in your Digital Classroom!
As a Mid-South arts organization, Tennessee Shakespeare Company values and redesigns our programming each year to meet the needs of our incredible educators and adult learners.
Our professional, diverse, Memphis-based education team has created pre-recorded and live Zoom events to assist your students’ journey through Shakespeare and literature while providing fun, dynamic activities to stir imaginations and engage hearts in a playful atmosphere.
These online playshops, lectures, and performances are affordably priced, accessible — and your first pre-recorded session selection is FREE. Bundles are available for schools.
TSC is committed to standing with schools, administrators, teachers, and parents to help our young people stay inspired and thriving.
For more information about TSC’s Online Academy and to book your courses, please contact Sarah Hankins at sarahhankins@tnshakespeare.org.
How It Works
TSC has a full Shakespeare curriculum to enhance student learning.
All pre-recorded materials come as a link to a YouTube playlist that can easily be put into many teaching platforms such as Edpuzzle, Vizia, and Google Classroom.
In each set of videos, the pauses are strategically placed so that you and your students may take time to engage in Shakespeare’s text in a playful and meaningful way, and then return to the next video on the playlist.
“CHALLENGE SHEETS” (noted below) are activity sheets that we provide you to be given to your students prior to your showing of the material. Students will be inspired to complete the challenges once the video has been shown.
Each video is pre-recorded with live, professional actors performing, then talking to your students about the scene, and then guiding them into activities with the challenge sheets.
The Digital Course Catalogue
Introductory Playshops:
Shakespeare Storytime
Pre-Recorded
20 Minutes
Our professional actors have Shakespeare Storytime with your students! Explore magical islands, enchanted forests, and royal castles!
$20
Fun with Poetry
Pre-Recorded
20 Minutes; YouTube playlist
Introduce poetry to your students in a fun and interactive way with our professional actors, then create poetry with prompts from our challenge activity sheets!
$20
Romeo and Juliet
Pre-Recorded
20 minutes; YouTube playlist
Meet Romeo and Juliet with your students in a fun and interactive way with our professional actors, then explore text with our challenge activity sheets!
$20
Tempest Tossed
Pre-Recorded
20 minutes; YouTube playlist
Discover The Tempest with your students in a fun and interactive way with our professional actors, then explore elements of the play yourself with our challenge activity sheets!
$20
Speak the Speech
Live Zoom
30 minutes
This fun playshop will excite your students about Shakespeare’s language and stories!
$35
FREE: Holiday Stories and Songs
Pre-Recorded
19 minutes
Join us for a holiday celebration featuring stories and songs from different cultures! Some of the stories and songs featured include: “Winter Wonderland,” “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” and “The Night Before Christmas.” This holiday celebration runs for approximately 19 minutes.
Free; Available Now
5-Day Long Residency:
Midsummer Madness
Pre-Recorded
15 minutes per day, plus Challenge Activities
Let your students meet Shakespeare with A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It’s playful and interactive with five 15-minute, pre-recorded segments with our professional actors, accompanied by engaging challenge sheets!
$50; Available now
Introductory courses:
Meet Romeo and Juliet
Pre-Recorded
30 Minutes; YouTube playlist
Watch your students befriend the major characters in Romeo and Juliet with our professional actors, and then discover major themes with our challenge activity sheets!
$20
Thy Poet Doth Invent
Live Zoom
30 Minutes
Your students will approach poetry in a fun and interactive way with our professional actors, then become poets with prompts from our challenge activity sheets!
$35; Available now
Speak the Speech
Live Zoom
30 Minutes
This engaging, live playshop will excite your students about Shakespeare’s language and stories!
$35; Available now
Meet Julius Caesar!
Pre-Recorded
30 Minutes; YouTube Playlist
Kick off your students’ study of Julius Caesar in a fun and interactive way with our professional actors, then explore text with our challenge activity sheets!
$20
Meet Macbeth!
Pre-Recorded
30 Minutes; YouTube playlist
Bring your students into the world of Macbeth in a surprisingly interactive way with our professional actors, then live through major moments via our challenge activity sheets!
$20
5-Day Residency:
Midsummer Madness
Pre-Recorded
15 minutes a day, plus Challenge Activities
Explore A Midsummer Night’s Dream with your students in a fun and interactive way across five days with our professional actors, then be creative with our challenge activity sheets!
$50; Available now
The Romeo and Juliet Residency
Live Zoom
Three 30-Minute Sessions
This multi-session, live residency with professional actors teaches students alternatives to violence in their own lives. Students learn the play, and how modern and personal it can be for them. TSC provides scheduling assistance to integrate with your own curriculum to enhance your instruction.
$225 for all three sessions
Session One: The Launch (Prologue; Act I, Scene 1)
Live Zoom
30-Minute Session
Students live the prologue, meeting the two families whose participation in an ancient feud results in ongoing violence that terrorizes the community. Students discover rage to be the underlying emotion of the story as they identify with the young characters in the play. TSC provides scheduling assistance to integrate with your own curriculum to enhance your instruction.
$75 for only Session One
Session Two: The Choice to Fight (Act III, Scene 1)
Live Zoom
30-Minute Session
Opportunities to avoid violence and confrontation are discovered and rehearsed as students become the four young people in the midst of hot anger and mortal weapons. The play takes tragic turns, and students see the power of truth and the courage it takes to bear witness. TSC provides scheduling assistance to integrate with your own curriculum to enhance your instruction.
$75 for only Session Two
Session Three: Near Misses (Act V)
Live Zoom
30-Minute Session
Students live highlights in Act V, experiencing what mere seconds can do to an outcome and how accidents can be averted. Offers made to exit dangerous situations are illuminated, as well as the power of truth and its ability to heal. TSC provides scheduling assistance to integrate with your own curriculum to enhance your instruction.
$75 for only Session Three
Romeo and Juliet during a Pandemic
Pre-Recorded
90 Minutes
This 90-minute performance of the play with nine professional actors is played in the time of COVID-19 using Shakespeare’s personal experience with quarantine and contagion, which deeply informs the play. TSC can provide an edited performance script for student use.
$20 for performance; $25 additional for optional Actor Talk-Back
Introduction Playshops:
Julius Caesar, Enter the Forum
Pre-Recorded
30 minutes; YouTube Playlist
The power of protest and the danger of mob mentality becomes palpable as this Karaoke speak-along thrusts students into the orations with TSC’s professional actors.
$20; $25 additional for optional Actor Talk-Back
Meet Macbeth
Pre-Recorded
30 minutes; YouTube Playlist
Bring your students into the world of Macbeth in a surprisingly interactive way with our professional actors, then live through major moments via our challenge activity sheets
$20; $25 additional for optional Actor Talk-Back
Who’s There? Hamlet
Pre-Recorded
30 minutes; YouTube Playlist
Hamlet becomes lead detective and lead avenger. Your students accompany his plight with our professional actors leading the way. Interactive and inspiring, challenge activity sheets navigate your students along Hamlet’s journey.
$20
Meet Midsummer!
Pre-Recorded
30 Minutes; YouTube playlist
Launch your students into A Midsummer Night’s Dream in a fun and interactive way with our professional actors, then explore text with our challenge activity sheets!
$20
Meet King Lear!
Live Zoom
45 Minutes
Explore The Tragedy of King Lear through a series of activities brought to you by TSC teaching artists via zoom, then continue your journey with materials to help the students learn the story of the play, including a one-hour cut version of the text to perform with your students.
$45
5-Day Residencies:
You choose your play from Hamlet, Macbeth, or Othello!
Pre-Recorded
15 minutes a day, plus Challenge Activities
Explore Hamlet, Macbeth, or Othello with your students in a fun and interactive way over five days with our professional actors, then explore it with our challenge activity sheets!
$50
Directing Shakespeare
Live Zoom
Offered Monthly; Dates TBA; 90 Minutes
You’ve directed Chicago. You’ve directed Noises Off. Now it’s time for a Shakespeare play! We have lots of experience helping teachers create the environment where non-competitive, celebratory, active, fun Shakespeare can come to life. Let us bring this toolkit to you! Maximum participants: 12.
$25 per participant; includes Teacher Packet; Available Now
Teaching Shakespeare
Live Zoom
Offered Monthly; Dates TBA; 90 Minutes
Bring Shakespeare off the page and into the hearts of your students! We come with a bountiful treasure-chest of games, exercises, and templates that invite students into the world of William Shakespeare in ways that are personally meaningful, active, and fun. This playful, engaging training will allow for a joyful, exploratory experience with your students as they discover Shakespeare’s plays. Maximum participants: 12.
$25 per participant; includes Teacher Packet; Available Now.
FREE 9-minute Talk: Shakespeare in Kindergarten, or Let Rome Fall
a radical proposal for a radical time by TSC Founder and Producing Artistic Director Dan McCleary
If our country’s education system increasingly feels to you as if it is manifest exclusively in rubrics, tests, and computer software, you are not alone. “Learning” has a varied definition in our classrooms. Articulating feelings, playing, creating, and personal discovery can seem diminished or even exempted from education. Shakespeare’s plays were written for those who could not read; loved to play; needed visual and aural focus; were hungry for words; and were curious about their genesis, what to do in the face of violence and love, and how to speak truth to power. By formally adapting Shakespeare’s plays into our core curriculum starting in Kindergarten, we might rebuild our humanist culture and prevent a second fall of Rome in America.
Available Now.
The Decameron Project
The Decameron is an influential book written by Italian poet Giovanni Boccaccio in the mid-14th Century. He managed to escape the plague in Florence, but the epidemic took the lives of most people in Europe. It was Boccaccio’s survival that inspired him to write The Decameron: a linguistically surprising, form-breaking piece of literature whose narrative is framed by seven women and three men self-quarantining themselves outside of Florence and charging themselves with telling thematic stories of love each night, sans cleaning days and holy days. Ten nights x ten stories = 100 stories. This wonder of literature has influenced writers for centuries, including Chaucer and our own William Shakespeare (his All’s Well That Ends Well is a direct lift).
Inspired by this creativity, courage, and beauty amid isolation and fear, TSC brings you our own Decameron Project — an effort in which our artists bring you classical pieces, inspirational poetry, short performances from Shakespeare, and brief looks at this day in the history of cultural arts and significant events, all of a theme as outlined by Aristotle’s twelve virtues.
30-Minute Lectures
$10 each, with optional Speaker Talk-Back for additional $25
Structure of the Verse
with Stephanie Shine
This easy primer gets you started in understanding the rhythm of Shakespeare’s verse and the acting notes inherent in iambic pentameter.
Why Shakespeare?
with Dan McCleary
Our most frequently-asked question gets TSC’s Producing Artistic Director going. “Shakespeare can save the world.”
$15 each for digital access to Salon for 48 hours, with optional Speaker Talk-Back for additional $25
Classical Creations in Quarantine
We are not the first humans to suffer death, quarantines, and loss of work and wealth due to a health pandemic. However, one occupation always faces the dangerous unknown: the Creative. What can we learn from them in our own time of social distancing and restricted gatherings? Join curator Dan McCleary, Stephanie Shine, Michael Khanlarian, Carmen-maria Mandley, and Darius Wallace for an intrepid exploration of famous creations by artists while enduring multiple forms of isolation, including Cervantes, Galileo, Thoreau, Anne Frank, Beethoven, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Frida Kahlo, Boccaccio, Malcolm X, Vaclav Havel, Frederick Douglass, Allen Ginsberg, and William Shakespeare.
Creative Extremists: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Frederick Douglass, and Malcolm X
Conflict births the potential for new opportunities through self-determination, creative expression, and self-preservation. Frederick Douglass, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X all were inspired by the power of the written and spoken word. Dr. King was inspired by the writings of Gandhi; Malcolm X by revolutionaries, including the founding fathers; and Frederick Douglass by the Bible, Aesop’s fables, Shakespeare, and Lord Byron.
In a Purple Mood: Alice Walker
A Georgia native, Alice Walker showcased her rare scholarship and poetic prowess as a student. Her short stories, novels, and poems deftly examine the struggles of Black people, particularly women. In addition to teaching, Walker was the editor of Ms. Magazine and is credited with identifying the Florida grave of Zora Neale Hurston and reviving interest in her writing. The Salon will feature her poetry (Taking the Arrow Out of the Heart), interviews, and excerpts from The Color Purple.
Like to a Lonely Dragon: Shakespeare’s Election of Coriolanus
You may not be familiar with Coriolanus, but now is a good time to be. Shakespeare’s superior political play was created while London’s playhouses were shut down, while the starving workers were rising in protest against the land-owners, and after his mother died. He chose the age of Rome through which to examine abuses of elected leaders, the exercise of basic civil liberties, and shifting systems of government. A thinly-veiled form of Democracy and a shocking political election at the play’s center launch a story short on poetry but long on freedom – of the heart, of the people, and of their leadership. Curated by Dan McCleary.
Halloween’s Tell-Tale Heart: Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, and Flannery O’Connor
Enter, if you will, the Southern Gothic horror of Flannery O’Connor with special northern guests Ambrose Bierce and Edgar Allan Poe. Expect thrills and surprises as these writers take unexpected twists and turns with terrors both real and imagined.
From Dublin to the Sea: John M. Synge
Meet the man whose plays caused riots in the streets of Dublin and New York in the early 20th century. With humor and a rare ear for Irish colloquialisms, J.M. Synge’s short career left an indelible mark on Ireland and modern playwriting. His Riders to the Sea is lauded as the perfect one-act play, and his Playboy of the Western World is a searing comic look at the complexities and dichotomies of the human experience.
A Little, Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving: Louisa May Alcott
Louisa offers a recipe to enliven your Thanksgiving season, sharing heightened moments of the festive holiday from both her imagination and her past (Little Men and An Old Fashioned Thanksgiving). Spiced with discoveries of gratitude in everyday life and relationships that she made throughout her life, Louisa’s Thanksgiving is worth remembering for all of us.
The Hunting Heart: Carson McCullers
“The heart is a lonely hunter with only one desire! To find some lasting comfort in the arms of another’s fire…driven by a desperate hunger to the arms of a neon light, the heart is a lonely hunter when there’s no sign of love in sight!” Carson wrote to quench the loneliness of her own heart, and her journey gives us insight into how we all may find our heart’s company. Her stirring prose soars when spoken, with a melody fueled by gut-wrenching truths.
Private Coaching
Live Zoom
30/55 Minutes
Bring your Shakespeare speech or scene to TSC’s Stephanie Shine for a focused, private Zoom session to work on for your audition, performance, study, or pleasure. We also can help you discover a Shakespeare piece that is appropriate for you. All acting experience levels are welcome. Sessions take place Monday-Friday. Please see the weekly schedule for specific times. Payments must be made in advance, and there are no refunds. Time-slots will be strictly adhered to.
$30/$45; Available Now