The COVID-19 pandemic hit the Shakespeare community hard. Not only were conference meetings cancelled, but also live performances at playhouses and festivals worldwide. Eager to entertain and maintain their loyal fan base, theatre companies with access to a store of pre-recorded productions offered them freely for public home consumption via the internet. At the same time, scholars and teachers scrambled to complete their academic years by converting classroom and lecture hall meetings into virtual educational opportunities. Synchronous and asynchronous teaching models responded to the social distancing needs of twentyfirst-century educators and students. If a pandemic could impact the long-dead Shakespeare, then 2020 was the year for it to happen. With videoconferencing the new norm, any classroom, any stage, any ‘on your feet’Shakespeare delivery method, along with a host of other in-person activities, seemed stretched to their limits. Significant in the context of a community of international educators for whom ‘Shakespeare and performance’in the classroom remains an intrinsic part of their pedagogy, the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak highlighted certain avoidable inequities associated with the methodology’s reliance on personal and professional creativity. As vulnerable populations succumbed to the insidious pandemic–whether through poverty, inequality, inadequate healthcare or political negligence–and as social and economic disasters unfolded worldwide, many ‘Shakespeare in performance’educators found it necessary to reconsider not only their delivery methods, but also the ongoing value of their pedagogical approach given its close interaction with Shakespeare’s texts as actionable, breathable and speakable entities. Action, breath and the spoken word, the embodied cultural currencies of Shakespeare in any performance setting, now bore an additional weight–that of infectious disease. Fear of social interaction and proximity, fear of the air we share and breathe, negatively impacted the Shakespeare-consumer value system, turning creatively and spiritually life-enhancing art practices into dangerous sites of communal infection. As this article suggests, however, those most impacted by society’s new-found suspicion of close social interaction were the very people on whom Shakespeare and performance pedagogy ultimately relied, and still relies: our nations’ actors. Without effective support for actors and other creative personnel, the liveliness of performance, by necessity, could find itself ossified in a cloud-based repository of past artistic endeavour.