The Magic of Shakespeare UNABRIDGED

Once upon a time, a princess displeased her tyrannical father and was banished from their kingdom.

Once upon a time, a tiff between fairies spilled into the human world, catching up a bunch of unsuspecting mortals in their mischief and magic.

Once upon a time, three witches made a prophecy and threw Scotland into war.

Once upon a time, a man named William Shakespeare wrote dozens of plays that changed the world. He wasn’t a prince or an aristocrat of any kind - he was the son of a glover. He read books and newspapers, listened to the stories of people he met, and distilled them into tales of shipwrecks, falling kingdoms, and romance.

And now we're inviting you into his world of fairy tales, ghosts, and strange enchantments, whether you're a long-established Shakespeare nerd or you're a little Shakespeare-curious.

An expansive and enchanting exploration of Shakespeare's plays through the lens of folklore. You'll experience impeccable scholarship, sparkling adaptations, fairies and folktales, and Gothic ghosties.

But most importantly, you'll learn the folkloric keys that unlock the plays so that you can understand and enjoy them as you never have before.

When you study Shakespeare through folklore, the puzzle pieces snap into place - we know from personal experience how dazzling and immensely satisfying it feels!

In this course, we bring Shakespeare down to earth, showing you it's for you, and then fling it up into the stars so you can see all the folklore and magic that weave the plays together. We'll show you why the plays mattered then and also why they matter now.

What's Inside:

The Magic of Shakespeare UNABRIDGED is the biggest version of this course we've ever run. The core lectures, seminars, and bonus talks are self-study and can be done at your own pace. And we'll have two live community events for questions, connection, and scholarly glee.

Each week of the course will feature a deep dive into one of these five topics...

Shakespeare & the Folkloric Lens

You might already know that Shakespeare drew on history, literature, and the classics when he wrote his plays… but did you know that folklore underpins most of them too? We start the course by showing you how a folkloric lens can make understanding Shakespeare so much easier!

Fairies

Fairies - Shakespeare used (and maybe even introduced?!) some excellent fairylore in his plays. From Titania and Oberon’s spat in A Midsummer Night’s Dream to the supernatural powers on The Tempest’s island, you'll discover what fairy tricks and tribulations can tell us about human tensions.

Fairy Tales

Shakespeare’s Romances are made of fairy-tale building blocks: lost heirs, sleeping princesses, magic books, and even impossible happily-ever-afters. You'll learn what Shakespeare owes to the fairy tale, and what the fairy tale owes to Shakespeare… including two of the earliest literary versions of "Snow White"!

Witches & Ghosts

You might already know that Hamlet starts with a ghost sighting, but this week, we show you just how haunted…even profoundly GOTHIC…Shakespeare can get. Ruins, witches, and ghosties give rise to revenge, bloodshed, family secrets dragged into the light, and so much more!

Gender

Gender is constructed and communicated through folklore all the time, and Shakespeare gets it. The plays contain at least FIVE significant cross-dressing heroines (including some of our very favorite characters in the whole canon), and they present an incredible window into gender, play, and creativity.

"Oh god," you might be thinking, "are you seriously going to make us read 400 year old plays??"

Nah, not if you don’t want to! We'll give you summaries of the plays we discuss and short excerpts to give you a taste of Shakespeare’s language.

(And if that’s enough to get you curious to keep reading, that’s awesome.)

Our goal isn’t to drown you in difficult reading - it’s to build a bridge between you and Shakespeare so that you can appreciate something that should be yours.

In addition to our five core lectures, The Magic of Shakespeare: Unabridged also includes the SHAKESPEARE SEMINARS where we talk in even more in depth about adapting Shakespeare... and read five very different examples together!

One of our favorite things about Shakespeare is adaptation. To some extent, this happens every single time the play is staged, but adaptation and Shakespeare can have extraordinary range. Across the five seminars, you'll read or watch an iconic rom-com, a (literally) sweet YA novel, a Serious Literary Novel, a stylish graphic novel, and one of our favorite romance novels of all time. Each one is a brilliant and wonderfully original Shakespeare adaptation.

If you’re a writer, artist, or creator who wants to learn more about the craft of adapting Shakespeare for your own work, you're going to love these. But the seminars are very much for enthusiastic readers and media consumers of all stripes.

Basically? If you think the idea of Shakespeare retellings are cool, you're gonna love this.

To get the most out of the self-study seminars, please acquire the following additional materials - 10 Things I Hate About You (film), Midsummer's Mayhem by Rajani LaRocca (book), The Gap of Time by Jeanette Winterson (book), Toil and Trouble by by Mairghread Scott, Kelly Matthews, and Nichole Matthews (graphic novel), and A Lady for a Duke by Alexis Hall (book)

Please also obtain a copy of the film Hamnet for the live group watch on April 23rd

PLEASE NOTE THE FOLLOWING TRIGGER WARNINGS:
The Gap of Time: rape (on page in the section titled "Goads Thorns Nettles Tails of Wasps"), assault, gun violence, murder, child abandonment
Lady for a Duke: explicit (positive) sex on page
Hamnet: child death

2026 Additional Live Events

We're also hosting TWO brand-new LIVE AND INTERACTIVE events to go with this new, unabridged 2026 version of the course!

Group Watch of Hamnet

April 23rd, 2026 at 7PM ET

Join Sara and Brittany for a group watch of the 2025 film Hamnet, winner of multiple awards (including the Best Actress Oscar) and heaps of praise. Fair warning, this film is pretty much guaranteed to make you cry, but also it's also witchy Shakespeare, so... worth it?

Shakespeare Fireside Chat

April 30th, 2026 at 7PM ET

While the lessons and seminars are self-study, we wanted to host a special session for live discussion and questions! Bring all of your Shakespeare ponderings and join your fellow classmates for a night of hardcore nerdery and community.

The Gates of Carterhaugh Are Open For...

(Already have a previous version of the course and want access to the UNABRIDGED seminars and new live events? Check your email for a coupon!)

$397

Early Bird Price!

Ends 4/1 at midnight ET!

$427

Full Payment

2 payments of $225/month

Two-Month Payment Plan

4 payments of $117.50/month

Four-Month Payment Plan

We’re just going to put our cards on the table. We love Shakespeare. We love it with the same intensity and starry eyes as we love fairy tales… because a lot of how Shakespeare works is very similar to fairy tales!

Sara grew up volunteering at the Atlanta Shakespeare Tavern to get free tickets to all the shows, and she was a member of the Atlanta Shakespeare Teen Ensemble which met at Oglethorpe University every Saturday morning at 9am. (If you know Sara and how much she loathes mornings with every fiber of her being, you will understand how insane this is.) She also formally studied Shakespeare at UPenn and Oxford, and the fact that she wrote her dissertation on folklore and fairy tales in 19th-century literature instead of in Shakespeare is literally just down to which professors she met and clicked with first.

Brittany fell in love with the language of Romeo and Juliet at a young age and never really got over it - especially not after she saw the dazzling neon spectacle that is Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet film! As a high-school girl who longed to be an actress, she studied countless performances, trying to figure out what it really was that brought Shakespeare’s words to life.

It makes us absolutely NUTS that Shakespeare is perceived as elitist and inaccessible, when, once upon a time, people knew it was beautiful, zany, sometimes slapdash, sometimes ethereal, and, most importantly, for them. It was informed by stories they knew, by their own folklore, performed or read in a way that could make it feel as familiar as Cinderella or Slenderman does to us now. It's our mission to make studying Shakespeare joyful, satisfying, and fun - just as the Bard would have wanted.

What's Included?

Five core video lectures about the week's main readings and key concepts. Expect college-level discussions, complex topics in accessible language, and very present senses of humor.
Five seminar video recordings where we talk more in depth about five longer works of Shakespearean adaptation across different kinds of media.
All play readings as PDFs and/or links will be available. For this course, we link to the actual plays AND summaries of the plays so no iambic pentameter if you don't want it! Or all the iambic pentameter. You do you.
Discussion questions for learning and self-discovery. These questions will help guide your reflections and determine how the folklore we discuss applies to your own journey.
Five Gorgeous "Grimoire Pages," beautifully designed PDFs that you can print and make part of your own course notebook! They also summarize each lesson.
Two brand-new live and interactive events, one where we'll watch a recent Shakespeare film together and another where we'll have a grand "fireside chat" all about your questions, ponderings, and discoveries!

The Magic of Shakespeare: Unabridged includes 5 core video lecture recordings, 5 seminar video recordings, and 2 brand-new live events. You'll also get discussion questions, five grimoire pages, and all course readings as PDFs/links (aside from the seminar books/films and Hamnet.)

A typical 3-credit college course can cost as much as $3000… you can get The Magic of Shakespeare UNABRIDGED for just $427!!

NOT ENOUGH?

Surprise! We have three MORE bonuses for you too!

#1 -
BONUS LECTURE WITH SCHOLAR DR. CHARLOTTE ARTESE

This course includes a BONUS lecture with Dr. Charlotte Artese - "'None of woman born': Unborn Dragon-Slayers in Folk Narrative and Shakespeare’s Macduff"!

A mysterious apparition, summoned by the Weird Sisters, tells Macbeth that “none of woman born” can harm him. Macbeth’s nemesis Macduff fulfills this prophecy because “Macduff was from his mother’s womb untimely ripped,” that is, he was delivered by caesarian section and so technically not “born.” Myth, legend, and folktales, as it turns out, are replete with unborn heroes, and many of them vanquish dragons. If Shakespeare and his audience knew of this animosity between the unborn and dragons, they might see Macbeth as dragonish. In this talk, Dr. Artese will tell the stories of these dragon-slayers and reflect on their connection to Macbeth.

Charlotte Artese is a Professor of English at Agnes Scott College. She is the author of the excellent monograph Shakespeare’s Folktale Sources and the editor of Shakespeare and the Folktale: An Anthology of Stories. She has also published articles on Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and Thomas More’s Utopia.

#2 -
SHAKESPEARE PLAYLIST

Sara's read EVERY Shakespeare play (and she's seen all but two!) and she's curated a Complete Works of William Shakespeare playlist for you - one song for each play. Her choices are... unconventional (and hilarious!)

Think Taylor Swift's "Bad Blood" for MacBeth, the Scorpions' "Rock You Like a Hurricane" for The Tempest, and "Bad Day” by Daniel Powter for Henry VI, Part II!

#3 -
BONUS LECTURE WITH ACTOR AND WRITER EMILY CARDING

The course also includes another BONUS lecture with actor, writer, scholar, and artist Emily Carding - "The Winter's Tale as Shakespeare's version of the Eleusinian mysteries!"

Emily's gorgeous talk is equal parts scholastic, esoteric, and mystical. Buckle up - it's about to get very witchy in here.

Emily Carding is the creator of The Transparent Tarot, The Tarot of the Sidhe and The Simple Wisdom of the Household Dog for Schiffer Books and author of Faery Craft, So Potent Art: The Magic of Shakespeare and Seeking Faery.

They have appeared in versions of 24 of Shakespeare’s plays on stage and screen and won multiple awards for their innovative approach to Shakespearean performance including Brite Theater’s immersive solo adaptations of Richard III and Hamlet, and their own Quintessence, a sci-fi solo show which imagines a future in which an AI recreates humanity using the complete works of Shakespeare as a guide.

Click here to read more testimonials!

Your Teachers

We, Dr. Sara Cleto and Dr. Brittany Warman, are award-winning folklorists, teachers, and writers with a combined 26 years in higher education, two streaming series on The Great Courses+, and over 150 publications (including our new book, Fairylore: A Compendium of the Fae Folk!) Together, we founded The Carterhaugh School of Folklore and the Fantastic, teaching creative souls how to re-enchant their lives through folklore and fairy tales. In 2019, Carterhaugh won the Dorothy Howard Award from the American Folklore Society.

When we aren’t teaching at Carterhaugh, we're scholars, writers and best friends who have published peer-reviewed articles, appeared on podcasts, sold stories and poems, written book introductions and encyclopedia entries, and written for magazines and blogs. (We’ve also been known to crush “Total Eclipse of the Heart” at karaoke.) We're regular writers for Enchanted Living Magazine, and we also deliver sold-out lectures at venues like the Smithsonian, the Library of Congress, the Profs & Pints series, the Maryland Renaissance Festival, the Contemporary American Theater Festival, and FaerieCon.

We love teaching. Our classes reflect the joy we get out of the strange and delightful world of folklore, so expect lots of gifs and terrible puns in our lectures. We'll occasionally make horrible faces at each other and laugh like drunken pixies… and we want you to join us!

**You'll love this if...**

You've ever put a Shakespearean quotation in your bio
You love fairy tales (we're totally going to be using our folkloric lens here!)
You're curious, open-minded, a voracious reader, and want to geek out about Shakespeare in community!

**This isn't for you if...**

You're looking for a straight-laced experience of Shakespeare
You don't really like reading
You're looking for us to tell you the "one true meaning" of the plays

FAQ

"Um, what exactly IS Carterhaugh?" - The Carterhaugh School of Folklore and the Fantastic is an award-winning online school dedicated to classes on fairy tales, folklore, and all things fantastic. It was created by Sara and Brittany in 2016 as a place for those who dreamed of elven battles while studying economics, those who have always sworn they could see ghosts, and those who longed for a school of magic to send them an unexpected acceptance letter. We aim to use our knowledge and passion for these subjects to share their wonder, solidify their importance in society, and spread a bit of magic into the world. Want to know more? Check out our "About" page by clicking here!
"What do you mean by 'self-study' and 'unabridged'?" - We first taught The Magic of Shakespeare live in 2023, but we recorded all the lectures, seminars, and bonus materials to be shared again and again! Some students love the live courses, some prefer to go through the material at on their own and at their own pace. If you're the second kind of student, or just missed the live version of the course when it was offered, we periodically offer self-study versions of our courses. As for the 'unabridged' part, well, this 'self-study' version of The Magic of Shakespeare is actually a little different from usual, so it needed a different name (and, let's face it, 'unabridged' made us cackle.) First, we're offering the seminar version of this course as a self-study for the first time ever. Second, while most elements of this course are pre-recorded and on-demand, there are two live community events this time! We're doing a live group watch of the film Hamnet AND a live fireside chat where we'll discuss whatever Shakespeare-related questions, comments, etc. you may have. It's literally ALL THE SHAKESPEARE packed in!
“I’m just a folklore fan. I don’t want to ruin my enjoyment with a bunch of academic stuff.” - We are the last people in the WORLD who would ruin your enjoyment of folklore and literature!! Believe us, we’re just as passionate about the beauty and wonder of these tales, and we know that part of that wonder lies in their mystery. We will never tell you what a tale “means." These tales are meant to be explored, meant to inspire personal meaning. We’ll give you folkloric history, and how the tales have been interpreted in the past, but we’ll never tell you what you “have to” believe about any folkloric story and we’re CERTAINLY not the kind of professors who are gleeful about “ruining” folklore for people!
“Guys, I love this, but money is SO tight right now….” - Our school is an investment, it’s true, but it’s one you DESERVE. You are worth spending time and money on, and so is education. Plus, we're offering several different payment plans (along with Affirm, AfterPay, and Klarna through Teachable) to help you find an option that works. We know our community, scholarship, and the magic we make together is worth it, and we would love for you to join us.
"What if I hate this? Is there a refund policy?" - Please understand that we do not offer refunds. (You're not gonna hate this, we promise.)

Questions? Contact us at theprofs@carterhaughschool.com

Click here to read more testimonials!

Featured In:

The Gates of Carterhaugh are Open For...

(Already have the regular version of the course and want the seminar recordings and new live events? Check your email for a coupon!)

$397