Tilting at Windmills - brief information on various topics

Washington Monthly, May, 1999 by Charles Peters

The airlines pay $2.45 for the average food serving on a domestic flight. This, as you have surely guessed, represents a reduction from the $3.63 spent five years ago. Instead of being angry at the airlines, however, I feel sorry for them. They're obviously being robbed by their caterers. What I've been served on recent flights isn't worth anything near $2.45.

On the whole, we like and admire Hillary Clinton and would support her for the Senate. But we agree with George Stephanopoulos that her great weakness as a public figure is her dislike of the press. If her decision to stonewall on Whitewater was the administration's worst mistake, the second worst, at least in terms of the media, was the decision to close the door between the White House press room and the press secretary's office. This decision, at the beginning of Clinton's first term, got relations between the press and the president off on the wrong foot. It too was made by Hillary Clinton. She explained, according to Stephanopoulos' new book, that the president wanted "to be free to walk around without reporters looking over [his] shoulder." By closing the door, she made sure they would look over his shoulder and do so with hostility and suspicion.

When I went to public school I can only recall a handful of kids who were dropped at the door in the morning, and picked up in the afternoon by their parents. Today, if you drive by a school around 3 p.m. you're likely to see a long line of cars and vans waiting to pick up Jennifer and Jason.

Why? It must be more trouble for parents in an era when both are often working. The Milwaukee Journal, which recently ran an article on the phenomenon, quotes one authority on child care, Marguerite Kelly, saying, "Part of the great adventure of going to school is getting there and back without having their parents hanging around" I'm sure there really are some children who need protection from danger coming home from school or who live too far from school to walk. But on the whole, as one who walked a mile or so to and from high school, I agree with Kelly--except on freezing cold mornings.

Tom Bethell, David Ignatius, and I worked together here at the Monthly during the mid-1970s and we have remained friends to this day. So you can imagine how distressed I was to find that they both believe that it was the Earl of Oxford who actually wrote plays attributed to William Shakespeare. How could two such splendid fellows fall into such grave error!

To persist in their folly, they have to ignore one man: John Heminges. He more than any other person was responsible for collecting Shakespeare's plays and publishing them in the First Folio in 1623. How would he have known, you may ask, that he was publishing Shakespeare and not the Earl of Oxford? Because, dear reader, he had been a member of the Chamberlain's company since it was formed. It was the company--later called the King's Men--for which Shakespeare wrote his plays and for which he worked as an actor. "Heminges saw each just as it was finished," writes Marchette Chute in Shakespeare of London. "He had discussed the scripts with Shakespeare, worked over the casting and the staging, and had acted them with him" Another member of the Chamberlains company, Henry Condell, joined Heminges in publishing the First Folio. Ben Jonson, who wrote a preface for the First Folio, had also known Shakespeare as both actor and writer.

Bethell doubts that Shakespeare, without a university education, could have written "The Comedy of Errors," since he claims the Roman play from which its plot was taken wasn't translated from Latin until after Shakespeare's play was written. This ignores both Ben Jonson's statement that Shakespeare did have "small Latin" and the fact that Latin was the main subject at the Stratford grammar school. "Plautus and Terence became a regular part of the curricula and were often performed by schoolboys," write Thomas Marc Parrott and Robert Hamilton Ball in A Short View of Elizabethan Drama. The specific play of Plautus' on which "The Comedy of Errors" was based was "The Twin Menaechmi" Its popularity was such that, according to George Duckworth's The Complete Roman Drama, at least three other 16th-century plays had been based on it before Shakespeare wrote "The Comedy of Errors" So even if Shakespeare hadn't actually read "The Twin Menaechmi," the chances that he would have heard of it or its plot about twins and mistaken identity, either from schoolmates or from friends in the theater, are very strong.

I would never accuse my friends of snobbery, but I fear that most of their fellow Oxfordians are motivated by the conviction that a common man could not possibly have risen to Shakespeare's literary heights.

You can enjoy seeing an undraped Gwyneth Paltrow and still be a little taken aback to learn that 686 million adult videos were rented last year, according to The New York Times. Not R-rated movies but real hard-core X-rated pornography. That's three dirty movies for every person in the United States. You might take comfort from the fact that the 1998 figures were down slightly from 1997. But this is probably because of the increased access to pornography on the Internet.