Shax and the real world

Knowing that Natalie and I have a theatre background, Shakespeare is assumed more so than needed to be told. When people hear theatre, often times Shakespeare is the first thing that comes to mind, although I have never been in a Shakespeare performance in my life, the assumptions are still made. I think Shakespeare resonates with a people. His name means knowledge and an elite status that causes instant recognition. Like AIDS, Shakespeare is an easily recognizable word in the minds of all. Never thought I’d be able to relate Shakespeare and AIDS until this class. However, both AIDS and Shakespeare are associated with a certain socio-economic status. AIDS being that of low class and dirty, while Shakespeare means upper crust and clean. AIDS also tells a story of how a person lived, and Shakespeare is the ultimate “story of our lives.” The major difference is this, Shakespeare wrote his plays over 400 years ago, and AIDS is in our faces now. We praise and revere history and ignore the present thereby damaging our future. Service Learning in this class allows us to focus on both.

            With service learning we are allowed to straddle the line that so many of us choose to ignore, no longer must we pick a side, but we can blend them and use one to benefit the other. We study wars throughout the history of Shakespeare, families killing each other for claims to the throne, and we ignore the wars that are in our faces everyday. We imagine ourselves in Shakespeare’s time and how brothers can kill one another and how funny the sexual innuendos are. However we live in a society that pushes sex down our throat by the age of seven and then ignore the by-product of teen pregnancy and STDs, AIDS included.

            We think of AIDS as almost as distant of a past as Shakespeare, and not on-going. I know too many people who think of AIDS as something they read in books that wiped out thousands like the bubonic plague and then just went away. Sure people can still, rarely, catch the plague now, just like people, rarely, catch AIDS. The pure level of ignorance on this subject is not only upsetting but mind-blowing.

            We are privileged enough to pay thousands of dollars to learn about William Shakespeare and his great works, but we don’t use that privilege to put the book down and fight a war that Shakespeare could only imagine.

            I truly believe Shakespeare, being a man of the people, would write about the people, using his influence to draw notice to this ongoing epidemic. We put Shakespeare on this pedestal, and forget the fact that he wrote for his day, he took issues of his time and put them into stories that everyone knew, he snuck the problem in there and gave it focus when it would typically be ignored. Shakespeare absolutely has a place in the real world, because he lived in the real world. It is us, who choose not to live in the real world any longer.