Despite my poor knowledge of the play I soldiered through it all remembering Edgar as the last man standing and also that most of the aristos are named after their counties. Guessed 24a but the construction was clear enough.

Nice feeling to finish what seemed impossible at the outset. I wonder if setters are conscious of setting puzzles whose solving flows like that.

Even then, there were an awful lot of answers I pencilled in lightly because I couldn’t parse the clue.

I sometimes circle one or two clue numbers where I don’t quite get the parsing. This puzzle has eleven numbers circled! And I didn’t solve ARAGON.

I didn’t enjoy it. I just became bloody-minded in my determination not to be beaten. I don’t like obscure words in weekday crosswords (grainer and knevell). Yet I only had to turn to page 1026 of W.S’s complete works for several of the answers.

Well done, Nimrod, for fitting in so many characters, but must your clues be so long and convoluted?

In 16, I wondered if ‘receiving verbal rebuke’='getting an earful’, which in turn has to be read as ‘filling an ear’? Perhaps this is a stretch too far, but DG does indeed fill EAR.

Like Duncan, I was familiar with the daughters, but couldn’t have named another character, so the easy(ish) clues were welcome.

Of the more obscure words, at least grainer is a simple extension of a known word; knevell is an obscure alternative spelling of an obscure word with an obscure etymology, but gettable from the clue.

Many thanks to Nimrod and Duncan.

Thanks – this hasn’t been one of my better attempts at parsing crossword clues!

I thought I had looked at just about every possible combination of letters in MID-OFF but missed MIFF, a word I know very well. Your explanation of nil-nil makes a lot of sense.

I was stretching my Latin to get Deo Gratias and never thought of DG as an abbreviation.

As a pathetic attempt at excusing myself I can only say that I was trying to understand the wordplay on a ferry that was going up and down a bit in the North Sea and wasn’t concentrating as well as I should have been.

15a: I took OO to mean ‘nil-nil’, a no-score draw, the likely result in such circumstances.

16a: DG = ‘deo gratias’; in EAR, as in ‘flea in one’s ear’. I have slight problems with this, too.

18a: KNOCking (=banging) minus half of it and reversed.

26a: That’s pretty much how I read it.