TLS Crossword 1122 by Praxiteles (April 22, 2016): Sooner Or Bardolater

Gentlemen, let’s look to our business. Do not think, gentlemen, I am drunk. This is my ancient, this is my right hand, and this is my left. I am not drunk now. I can stand well enough, and I speak well enough.

Across

1 “And what’s her history?” “A — my lord” (Twelfth Night) (5)
BLANK

An exchange between Orsino and Viola. Fill in the blank with a BLANK!

4 “That need must needs — principle” (King John) (5,4)
INFER THIS

If you are very familiar with the text of King John – including these words spoken by Constance in Act III -you are a better Shakespearean than I. Still, even if nobody was expected to know this, perhaps they could have been expected to… well, you get the picture.

9 Touchstone, say, to woo “an ill-favoured thing” perhaps (5,4)
COURT FOOL

In As You Like It Touchstone is the court jester. He also woos “an ill-favoured thing”, Audrey by name, a dull-witted goatherdess. Appropriate enough for a court fool to court a fool, one must agree.

10 A Moor, one embracing Tamora latterly returning (5)
AARON – AN [one] embracing {tam}ORA reversed [“latterly” “returning”]

Aaron is the villainous Moor in my personal favourite Shakespeare play Titus Andronicus, and does indeed do his share of lascivious embracing of Tamora, Queen of the Goths, therein.

Fab fact: “Titus Andronicus” is a New Jersey punk band that has occasionally released records on the labels I work for and of whom I am passing fond. Here is the opening track of their debut album The Airing of Grievances, which manages to end with one of Aaron the Moor’s excellently moustache-twirling speeches. I guess one or more of the bands members *really* likes the play:

11 Urged by Helena, according to Hermia, called about start of evening (6)
HEIGHT HIGHT [called] about E{vening}

Now I perceive that she hath made compare
Between our statures. She hath urged her height,
And with her personage, her tall personage,
Her height, forsooth, she hath prevailed with him.—
And are you grown so high in his esteem
Because I am so dwarfish and so low?
How low am I, thou painted maypole? Speak.
How low am I? I am not yet so low
But that my nails can reach unto thine eyes.

At the risk of putting you all off your next meal, here’s your (6’4″) blogger playing Helena in a cross-cast MND in 2007. What a painted maypole!

12 Valentine, for example, one featuring in poem (8)
VERONESE – ONE featuring in VERSE [poem]

Valentine is, of course, one of two well-known gentlemen of Verona. Much more constant in love than his fickle friend Proteus, thanks to nominative determinism.

14 Like Petruccio’s horse, wandering green glade (4-6)
NEAR-LEGGED – (GREEN GLADE*) [“wandering”]

his horse hipped with an
old mothy saddle and stirrups of no kindred;
besides, possessed with the glanders and like to mose
in the chine; troubled with the lampass, infected
with the fashions, full of wingdalls, sped with
spavins, rayed with yellows, past cure of the fives,
stark spoiled with the staggers, begnawn with the
bots, swayed in the back and shoulder-shotten;
near-legged before and with, a half-chequed bit
and a head-stall of sheeps leather which, being
restrained to keep him from stumbling, hath been
often burst and now repaired with knots; one girth
six time pieced and a woman’s crupper of velure,
which hath two letters for her name fairly set down
in studs, and here and there pieced with packthread.

That Shakespeare fellow? I think it’s fair to say he had quite the way with words.

16 “To — our late Decree in Parliament” (3 Henry VI) (4)
DASH

It’s easy to lose track of the many players in the Henry VI trilogy (surely the Star Wars of its day?) but this is Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, the Yorkist “Kingmaker”, worrying about the imminence of decree-dashing Lancastrian Queen Margaret of Anjou.

You have to replace a dash with a DASH. This penny dropped for me appallingly late, I must admit…

19 “… here’s a simple — of life” (Merchant of Venice) (4)
LINE

Launcelot Gobbo, Shylock’s servant, wittering on about his palm’s life-line. Guess what? All you need to do to solve this clue is expand a line into a LINE.

20 What a wintry lark chants, and Lancelot in Riverside version? (5-5)
TIRRA-LIRRA

In The Winter’s Tale the lark chants tirra-lirra. In Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott”, Lancelot does the same by the river. What larks, Pip!

22 Like quotes here in part, a state that’s initially deficient (8)
TEXTLESS – TEX [a state] + T{hat’s} + LESS [deficient]

The quotes are all partly textless. Say what thou seest shall be the whole of the Law.

23 Cruel lover, e.g. “lust-breathèd Tarquin”, having change of heart, thou commented (6)
SAIDST – SA{D<->I}ST

I must confess I’m not very familiar with The Rape of Lucrece, but I’m assuming that the rapist Tarquin is quite a bad man. To a sensitive soul like myself, it was hard enough to get through the Rape of the Lock without fainting several times, let me tell you.

26 Ruff, female version, blue, top missing, found on Juliet’s shanks (5)
REEKY – REE [female ruff] + {s}KY

Chain me with roaring bears,
Or hide me nightly in a charnel-house
O’ercover’d quite with dead men’s rattling bones,
With reeky shanks and yellow chapless skulls.
Or bid me go into a new-made grave,
And hide me with a dead man in his shroud—
Things that, to hear them told, have made me tremble—
And I will do it without fear or doubt,
To live an unstain’d wife to my sweet love.

If she wouldn’t overnight in a charnel-house littered with bones and skulls and whatnot for you, she’s probably just not that into you, guys.

27 A bachelor in abbreviated Much Ado’s arranged a surprise attack (9)
AMBUSCADO – A + B [bachelor] in (MUC{h} ADO’S*) [“arranged”]

There are definitely some ambuscadoes – along with breaches and Spanish blades, exciting things like that in Romeo & Juliet. They sound a lot more exciting than ambushes to me, in the same way that tornados sound more exciting than bushes.

28 Knotted kind of eglantine I abandoned at start of Dream (9)
ENTANGLED – (EGLANT{i}NE*) [“kind of”] + D{ream}

I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine:

In Midsummer Night’s Dream, that’s where Titania is sleeping. How the other half lives, eh?

29 First of steps then another leads to Hamlet’s infinite kingdom (5)
SPACE – S{teps} + PACE [another (step)]

“I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.”
My God is that a line…

Down

1 One Titus, a lord, we hear! (9)
BACCHANAL – one who is “tight as a lord”, homophonically

Here’s a picture of me playing Titus Andronicus himself, again in 2007. Man, I was versatile back then:

2 I drag front of arras back, revealing a rodent! (5)
AGUTI – I TUG A{rras} back

I’m sure we all recall Hamlet stabbing Polonius through the arras (not to be confused with the manner of passing of Edward II, which is Marlowe not Shakespeare anyway), with the words “How now! a rat?” An ag(o)uti is a rodent larger than a rat but smaller than Polonius. What a clever clue!

3 Take about an hour and all to locate where there are super dainties? (4,4)
KATE HALL – (TAKE*) [“about”] + H + ALL

In Taming of the Shrew, Petruchio calls Kate “Kate of Kate Hall, my super-dainty Kate”. For dainties are all Kates, an assertion borne out by a lovely Kate I once knew, who is sadly no longer on this mortal coil but stayed very much untameable till the end.

4 I’d love to start to lionize Achilles, as seen by “idiot-worshippers” (4)
IDOL – I’D + O + L{ionize}

In Troilus and Cressida, my second favourite Shakespeare play, as it happens, Thersites describes Achilles as “thou picture of what thou seemest, and idol of idiot-worshippers”. It’s a brilliant hatchet-job on the Homeric heroic ideal, and has always left me deeply unconvinced by the assertion that Will had “small Latin and less Greek” – he had a pretty good handle on Homer, I’ll tell you that much as a classicist.

5 Like traitorous Clifford, he’s into deceptive cunning (5-5)
FALSE HEART HE, into FALSE ART

Henry VI again. “I am thy king, and thou a false-heart traitor.” Wikipedia states that “he was one of the strongest supporters of Queen Margaret of Anjou”, so it’s obvious he was a wrong ‘un.

6 Is it taken prisoner by mandragore as one Scot suggests? (6)
REASON – {mandrago}RE AS ON{e}

The one Scot being Banquo: “or have we eaten the insane root, that takes the reason prisoner?” I was seeing witches appear and vanish before my eyes by the end of Pint Club the other night, I can tell you.

7 Where Richard might have obtained what he wanted, in return for his kingdom? (5,4)
HORSE FAIR

“A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse!” Even if you don’t know Shakespeare from Shinola, you know this one, right?

8 “Of aids incertain should not be admitted”. But after that time was! (5)
SINCE – {aid}S INCE{rtain}

The quotation is spoken by Bardolph in Henry IV, Part 2.

13 & 6. How Macduff fled once more to lose control of his offspring? [Three-word answer] (7,3)
AGAINST ALL REASON – AGAIN + STALL + RE A SON

Lady Macduff is not best pleased that her hubby has abandoned his family: “the poor wren,
the most diminutive of birds, will fight, her young ones in her nest, against the owl. All is the fear and nothing is the love; as little is the wisdom, where the flight so runs against all reason.”

Macduff’s son is of course memorably stabbed with the immortal words “What, you egg!”

15 Page with unknown people at end of Hamlet – Rosencrantz’s addition (9)
ANNEXMENT – ANNE + X + MEN + {Hamle}T.

Anne Page appears in The Merry Wives of Windsor. Rosencrantz speaks in Act III of Hamlet of “each small annexment” to the great wheel of majesty, that are all dragged down into ruin along with the fall of a king.

Here’s a great king in Hamlet. The bad one, not the good one. They never let me play the good ones for some reason:

17 Like Valentine’s sighs when earth moves and God of Love’s in the ascendant? (5-4)
HEART-SORE – (EARTH*) + reverse of EROS

To be in love, where scorn is bought with groans;
Coy looks with heart-sore sighs; one fading moment’s mirth
With twenty watchful, weary, tedious nights…

Valentine’s perhaps not overly enamoured with love at the start of Two Gentlemen of Verona?

18 Absolves Lance at fault over Proteus’s final directions (8)
CLEANSES – (LANCE*) [“at fault”] + {Proteu}S + E S

Lance (along with his dog Crab) is one of the funniest characters in all of Shakespeare. He loves that dog so much. Actually another of the funniest characters in the Bardic oeuvre is DOGberry, which makes me think that Shakespeare might have had a thing for LOLdogs…

21 What Orsino commanded, and (quietly) Macbeth of Macduff (4,2)
PLAY ON – P + LAY ON

Another easy one even for those with the most tenuous grasps of Shakespeare: we all know “If music be the food of love, play on” and “lay on, Macduff”, no?

22 Incite to fight – held by Tybalt – arrested (5)
TARRE – {Tybal}T ARRE{sted}

I did not know “tarre” but apparently it is an obsolete word for “to provoke or goad”. For instance, “The nation holds it no sin to tarre them to controversy” which appears in Hamlet Act II. Everyone’s always going on about how Shakespeare invented so many words and phrases which are still in currency today – you don’t hear so much about the rubbish ones which were given the unceremonious boot in the intervening centuries, do you?

24 One to help overcoming widow’s daughter (5)
DIANA – AN AID reversed

Diana Capilet is the daughter of the widow in All’s Well That Ends Well. And a very hard young woman to seduce away from lifelong chastity, much to young Bertram’s frustration. Nominative determinism again.

25 Lincoln’s Lord at last found lying here? (4)
ABED – ABE + {Lor}D

Not to be confused with Leicester’s lord, or else the answer might have been CAR PARK.

Phew! That took a while, but it was a puzzle that seemed quite interesting to start with and then got continuously more brilliant the longer I spent parsing it. So I’ll hope you’ll all join me in giving a big hand to Praxiteles!