The Skunk Of Shaw
A quote, a quote, my kingdom for a King Lear quote.
Every day I unravel the Times crossword in The Australian, by and large filling the grid without too much apoplexy.
My personal best – cracking puzzles as they appear – is 76 in a row. The last word to trip me up is MUNRO BAGGER, back in March this year.
The phrase describes an obsessive fell-walker who scales every ben and tor listed in Munro’s Tables, a hiking guide compiled a century ago. While the phrase is news to me, I should have decoded the wordplay:
Violent thief about noon to steal from a person collecting in the Highlands (5-6)
Aaah yes, all so obvious now, but what the brain didn’t spot at the time was the simple equation of MUGGER (violent thief) around N (noon) and ROB (steal) to render this particular breed of Hibernian nutter.
Of course, a frazzled squiz on Google would have yielded fruit. Munro-bagger gets 7680 hits, including its only bloody website, where fellow tragic baggers chalk up their recent peaks.
But that’s the thing, I resist all Googling. Any net. Any reference book. The joy of solving a thorny puzzle is knowing all you possess are your wits, the ability to unpack the subtlest wordplay and/or call to plumb the darkest crannies of your vocab.
Which brings us to THE SKUNK OF SHAW. Or THE SKINK OF SLAB. Or THE EKING ON SOAP. Or whatever kinky phrase fits 6-bloody-Down.
Because I’m a Munro-bagger in a puzzle sense. Currently I’ve chalked up 39 back-to-back Times, dodging a few bullets along the way. But this latest obstacle is a quote from Shakespeare’s Lear, and buggered if I can figure out the wordplay. Take a look:
Lines from Lear don’t show fate, sadly, protecting a king (3,5,2,4)
As the grid’s last entry, I have every cross-letter, which looks like this:
T _ E / _ K _ N _ / O _ / S _ A _
And still I’m clueless. It can’t be an anagram – DON’T SHOW FATE around A/K. I’ve tested every zany outcome. And hitting the web is verboten, or trawling the Bard’s Concordance. It’s just Man versus Clue. Unless –
Unless, I just happen to read King Lear tonight. Amateur playwrights are wont to do that kind of thing – pick up a script and nibble. Appreciate the master’s stagecraft. Dwell on the story arcs. Celebrate the characterization, the tragic formula, the timeless quality of theme….and find the bloody quote!
That’s hardly cheating. Lear is not a Pears. A script is not a Wiki. And if there’s an epithet like THE SKANK OF SCAB sitting in Act IV, then I’ve bagged Puzzle #40. Then again, you may know the answer and save my SKINS too.