Solving time: 30:00 (5 unsolved)
I plodded my way through this one until (after about 20 minutes) I was left with five clues unsolved in the SE corner, and (not for the first time) made no further progress during the last 10 minutes. After my half-hour was up, I looked up 26A. I couldn’t remember which part of King Henry VI Jack Cade appeared in, but after I’d established it was Part 2, that seemed the obvious place to search for MATTHEW GOFFE, who turned out to be the leader of the king’s forces rather than (as I’d assumed) one of Cade’s followers. At that point (with –O—F in place) I should have got 19D straight away, but I was feeling impatient so I looked up 25A instead, and it was only when the U from PRUSSIA gave me –O-U-F that light finally dawned. With BEOWULF in place, BATHE was guessable at 19A and I vaguely remembered TIRASSE at 20D, but once again I felt I’d missed a decent chance of an “all correct” solution.
| Across | |
|---|---|
| 1 | EARL OF OXFORD – Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (1550-1604) is suggested as a possible author of Shakespeare’s plays |
| 8 | OVERACT – OVER + ACT |
| 9 | TAOISTS – (It’s oats)*; Taoism advocates compassion, frugality and modesty, so I suppose its adherents could reasonably be described as “tranquil folk” |
| 11 | IVANHOE – in Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819), the eponymous hero defeats various Normans in the lists (= the field of combat) at the tournament at Ashby-de-la-Zouch |
| 12 | ELITISM – “elite” is a type-writer typesize having 12 characters to the inch |
| 13 | IDEAS – Wilfred Scawen Blunt wrote Ideas about India (1885) |
| 14 | PYGMALION – in Greek mythology, Pygmalion was the sculptor and king of Cyprus who fell in love with the ivory statue he had made of his ideal woman, which Aphrodite then brought to life as Galatea |
| 16 | SCARLATTI – SCAR + (a tilt)*; the two best known composers with that name are Domenico (1685-1757) and his father Alessandro (1660-1725) – you can see Horowitz playing a couple of Domenico’s sonatas on YouTube |
| 19 | BATHE – an OED citation |
| 21 | ERASMUS – hidden in “furies in megaERA’S MUSeum”; the Dutch humanist philosopher (1466(?)-1536) |
| 23 | EGO-TRIP – (Rig poet)* (just one of “out” and “fantastically” would have been enough to indicate the anagram, but both are needed for the surface reading) |
| 24 | ANAPEST – AN + A + PEST; the American spelling of “anapaest”, a metrical foot consisting of two shorts followed by a long |
| 25 | PRUSSIA – The Prussian Officer is a short story by D.H. Lawrence, published in The Prussian Officer and Other Stories (1914) (I’m not familiar with this collection of short stories, but should really have been able to guess PRUSSIA – and almost certainly would have done if I’d had the U from BEOWULF) |
| 26 | MATTHEW GOFFE – in Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 2 Matthew Goffe, the leader of the king’s forces, gets one spoken mention – “And thither I will send you Matthew Goffe” – and (according to some versions) one mention in a stage direction – “Matthew Goffe is slain, and all the rest” (he’s so much of a bit player that I’d absolutely no idea about him, apart from guessing MATTHEW, though I suspect I might have guessed GOFFE if I’d had all the crossing letters) |
| Down | |
| 1 | ELEVATE – (tale Eve)* |
| 2 | REACHES – another OED citation |
| 3 | ON THE SPOT – (Pooh’s tent)* |
| 4 | OUTRE – hidden in “rex stOUT REissue” |
| 5 | FLORIDA – ID (= unconscious mind) inside FLORA (one of the children in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw) |
| 6 | ROSSINI – ROSS (the name adopted by T.E. Lawrence when he joined the RAF in 1922) + IN + I; Gioachino Rossini (1792-1868) |
| 7 | POPILIUS LENA – (spoil a lupine)*; a senator in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar who appears briefly in Act 3 Scene 1 and whom the conspirators Cassius and Brutus are worried may be going to betray them to Caesar, though I’m not certain whether that’s enough reason to describe him as a “fellow-traveller” (I have to confess that this was something of a toss-up, but he sounded slightly more familiar that POLINIUS LEPA, who seemed a little too close to Polonius in Hamlet to be true) |
| 10 | SIMON TEMPLAR – SIMON (the apostle) + TEMPLAR (= knight); the name of “The Saint” in Leslie Charteris’s novels |
| 15 | GUINEA PIG – Warren Chetham-Strode wrote the play The Guinea Pig (1946), which was later made into a film starring Richard Attenborough |
| 17 | ALABAMA – according to Brewer the official nickname of Alabama is the Cotton State, but apparently it’s also known unofficially as the Yellowhammer State; Augustus Thomas wrote the play Alabama (1891) |
| 18 | LAMBERT – Colonel Lambert is a character in Thackeray’s The Virginians (1857-9) [further note, added 2010-04-21: Colonel Lambert is promoted Major-General in the course of the book, thus making sense of “described in general terms”] |
| 19 | BEOWULF – the underwater encounter is with Grendel’s mother, whom Beowulf slays (I’m annoyed that I didn’t think of BEOWULF, who would have been the best way into the SE corner) |
| 20 | TIRASSE – a pedal-coupler in an organ, from the French tirer, meaning “to pull” (I could only think of COUPLER, and might even have taken a chance with it but for EGO-TRIP) |
| 22 | SATIE – the French composer Erik Satie (1866-1925) is probably best remembered for his Gymnopédies |
Gaps in knowledge revealed:
– Thackeray. Several abortive starts on his novels over the years.
– very minor Shakespeare characters. I wonder if Matthew Goffe was just some bloke who owed Shakespeare money. Getting slain offstage back then must have been akin to playing a corpse in CSI today.
– organ components (pipe, not biological)
– pseudonyms of T.E.Lawrence (disappointingly, since Lawrence of Arabia is my favourite movie). I can’t find a reference to this, Tony. Did you just happen to know?
– Warren Chetham-Strode (now that’s a name)
Still, better late …
I’m glad the guesswork is going well. As usual I needed a fair amount of it, but ALABAMA (for example), which was a pure guess, didn’t really seem to have much by way of an alternative.
I have to admit that the only Thackeray I’ve read is Vanity Fair, and that was many years ago. There was a time when Thackeray clues used to crop up every so often in the daily cryptic, and it could be that that’s where I came across Colonel Lambert – or maybe I just imagined that I’d come across him since I had enough crossing letters (L-M-E–) when I first reached 18D to make LAMBERT a likely answer in any case! (Does the clue imply he was a general? Perhaps he was promoted later on in the book.)
I’ve just looked up Matthew Gough in the DNB (which Ealing Library gives me access to) and it describes him as “one of the outstanding professional soldiers in English service in the fifteenth-century wars in France”. He’s definitely the same as Matthew Goffe, since he was killed in the action against Cade and his followers – but then Elizabethan spelling was notoriously erratic.
Looking at the wikipedia article on Terence Rattigan’s Ross again, I see that “large sections of the play script appear in the 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia. I hadn’t realised that, even though I imagine I must have seen the two within a few years of each other.
I’ve never seen the Rattigan play. I wonder if it will get a revival at any point. Your response prompted me to look into it and I came across this intriguing morsel:
Rattigan was fascinated with the life and character of T. E. Lawrence. In 1960 he wrote a play called Ross, based on Lawrence’s expoits. Preparations were made to film it, and Dirk Bogarde accepted the role. However, it did not proceed because the Rank Organisation withdrew its support, not wishing to offend David Lean and Sam Spiegel, who had started to film Lawrence of Arabia. Bogarde called Rank’s decision “my bitterest disappointment”.
It’s hard to imagine anyone outdoing Peter O’Toole’s portrayal (but then I grew up think O’Toole was Lawrence!) but Bogarde would have brought something very different and more cerebral to it. What a shame we never had the chance to make the comparison.
If I had to list the authors I feel I really should get around to, Thackeray and Trollope would be close to the top of the list (I bracket them together for some reason – maybe because one wrote a literary biography of the other). But I fear it may never happen unless find myself castaway for a months (or doing a stretch in chokey).
I’d go for Trollope rather than Thackeray if I were you. If I had to choose just one book, it would have to be Barchester Towers, which is a delight – though perhaps it helps that several of my forebears were clergymen. But, better still, start with The Warden and work your way through the Barsetshire Chronicles.