A tricky one from Araucaria in the Guardian yesterday and a similar offering from Cinephile in today’s FT. There was a gentle hint at the beginning that ‘the works are similar’ which helped to narrow down the choice of plays and having ‘a?o’ for the second word in 12a these all fell readily into place.
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Across
1 COINCIDENTAL COIN (money) CI (chief inspector initially) DENTAL (of teeth)
8 OVERARM cd – to ‘lob’ a ball you would generally need to go underarm
9 ENTERIC *(CENTRE I) – ‘enteric’ is a short form of ‘enteric fever’, an infectious disease that causes nasty things to happen to one’s intestines
11 TURBINE dis[TURBIN]g E – I assume the ‘at start’ refers to the beginning of the clue to give the ‘E’
12, 13, 24 MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING MU (Greek letter) CHAD (land, country) A BOUT (a fight) in O NOTHING (two cyphers) – a ‘cypher’ is the character ‘0’ in mathematics
14 IMMEDIATE IM (Cinephile is) MEDIATE (act as referee)
16 RECOMMEND COMME (as, in French) in REND (tear)
19 THING *(NIGHT)
21 COARSEN CO (company) ARSEN[al] (a lot of weapons)
23 UPPSALA UP (winning) PS (pawns) ALA (in the style of) – Founded in 1477, the Uppsala University is the oldest centre of higher education in Scandinavia and much of Northern Europe
25 MACBETH BET (speculate) in MACH (number) – see yesterday’s Guardian blog if you don’t know what a Mach number is 🙂
26 PROFITEROLES PROFIT (gain) E (English) ROLES (parts)
Down
1 CHEERIO EER (forever) in CH (companion) IO (I love)
2 IMAGIST MAGI (wise men) in IST (first or 1st) – a reference to the imagist (poet) Ezra Pound
3 CYMBELINE MY reversed BE in CLINE – a pleasing use of ‘incline’ to denote the insertion
4 DREAM RE (concerned with) in DAM (barrier)
5 NOTICED cd – a plain cake has no icing on it
6 ADRIANA *(AIDA RAN) – Adriana is the wife of Antipholus of Ephesus in Shakespeare’s ‘A Comedy of Errors’. Strangely enough the title of this play was one of the answers in yesterday’s Independent
7 SOUTH AFRICAN *(SAFARI COUNT [mont]H)
10 CHOREOGRAPHY CHORE (routine) GO reversed RAP (knock) H[app]Y – ‘routine’ could be seen as doing double duty here, part of the definition and part of the wordplay, but I also think it works if the definition is simply ‘dancing’
15, 22 MIDSUMMER NIGHT IDS (identifications) in MUMMER (actor) NIGH (close) T (time)
17 CHAPTER dd – ‘chapter’ is a ‘cathedral body’ and ‘a sequence of events having a common attribute’. I have seen ‘chapter of errors’ before but needed Collins to confirm ‘chapter of accidents’ as being “a series of misfortunes’ or ‘the unforeseeable course of events’
18 MASTIFF MA (degree) STIFF (formal)
19 TOPICAL TOPI (hat) CAL (US State)
20 IN A MESS MESSINA (a Sicilian city) with the second half brought to the front – I would normally expect ‘inversion’ to indicate that the whole word is reversed so I spent some time looking for city in Sicily that ended with ‘ani’
I think that ‘Much Ado’ is set in Messina.