Answers: Falstaff
The Trail to the 'Fiction' Box
By the time the Stage 3 sheets were given out in the Good Yarn, most teams had noted the several references to Windsor and Falstaff. One enterprising team had already connected Oldcastle to Old Windsor with a certain leap of imagination.
Keeping Windsor in mind and using the map provided with its red cross and cemetery and hospital markings should have led to The Oxford Blue , Crimp Hill, Old Windsor. Any doubts would have been dispelled through a visit, when the picture of the Oxford Blue pub would have provided confirmation.
A drawing of Sir John was provided (lifted from the cover of an edition of Merry Wives of Windsor) which gives the general impression of our hero with drinking cup in hand. The script beginning Tutto e finito was penned by Verdi on the final copy of his opera Falstaff before dispatching it to his agent. If translated it becomes a fond farewell to Sir John [7]. The fragment of music comes from the last piece of the opera as confirmation [8].
The biography beginning "A courageous soldier…" was derived from the various plays and the opera and listed assorted epithets applied to Sir John [3].
The reference to "Traicte des Chiffes" was meant to lead teams to translate the coded instructions starting KRZE BNS YZRY through using the Vigenere encryption scheme familiar to regular entrants to these competitions. Traicte des Chiffes was published by Vigenere in 1586 although, in fact, this was not the work in which he described his code. His method requires a keyword, and no one should be surprised to find that this is FALSTAFF. However, a slight coding error meant that you had to start from both ends of the message to finally make any sense of it. The decoded text reads as follows: [6]
FROM INN TURN RIGHT AND WALK TO CEMETERY. TAKE PATH TO BEARS RAILS. GO THROUGH WOODEN GATE PAST LODGE ON THE RIGHT AND THROUGH NEXT GATE. FOLLOW PATH AS IT SWINGS LEFT. AT JUNCTION WITH STREAM AND SANDY RIDING TRACK, FOLLOW SANDY RIDING TRACK TO CREST OF HILL. CONTINUE ON TRACK LOOKING FOR DITCH ON THE LEFT THAT FORMS A RIGHT ANGLE. THE BOX IS UNDER TREE TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY SEVEN BY SIDE OF DITCH.
It all makes sense when you get there. Several of the trees in this area have a numbered label on them. The wooded area where the box was buried used to form part of Windsor forest as featured in Merry Wives so completing the Falstaff/Windsor connection.
The box in question is, of course our 'Fiction' box and hence the final stage in the false trail [8].
Shakespeare Puzzle and Quiz
These confirmed the Falstaff connection and gave the chance for some extra points. The quiz answers were.
1. Which plays have a character called Antonio? Five in all - The Merchant of Venice, The Tempest, Twelfth Night, Much Ado About Nothing, and The Two Gentlemen of Verona [1].
2. Which plays open with Boatswain! Tush! Hence! O! The Tempest, Othello, Julius Caesar and Henry IV Part 2 respectively [3].
3. Who, and of what relevance, were William Kempe, Francis Meres and Barnabe Rich? Kempe was an actor - the star of the original production of many of Shakespeare's plays. He also danced a morris from London to Norwich. Meres was an Elizabethan anthologist and critic who made several important contemporary references to Shakespeare. Rich was an Elizabethan writer, one of whose stories is the basis for the plot of Twelfth Night. Coincidentally, he also fought in the struggle for Calais mentioned in the Mary Queen of Scots section [4].
4. Which plays have scenes set in: A brothel in Vienna; A brothel in Mytilene; A wood near Athens; A cave near Athens? Measure For Measure, Pericles, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Timon of Athens respectively [2].
5. In which plays do these characters appear: Proculeius, Francisca, Servilius, Bernaldo, Archidamus? Antony and Cleopatra, Measure for Measure, Timon of Athens, Hamlet, and The Winter's Tale respectively [1].
6. Who wrote "To be or not to be; that is the bare bodkin/That makes calamity of so long life;?/For who would fardels bear, till Birnham/wood do come to Dunsinane/But that the fear of something after death,/Murders the innocent sleep..." Mark Twain The lines are from Huckleberry Finn, from the fuddled memory of the self-styled Duke of Bridgewater, an actor and con-man [9].
This leaves the other apparent code starting GFAAA and the crossword-like grid. Basically, the letters can be slotted into the grid to give a Shakespeare quotation. The letters are shown inconveniently in alphabetical order for each column, making this a bit of a struggle to sort out.
The final quotation is "Good name in man or woman, dear my Lord/ Is the immediate jewel of their souls:/ Who steals my purse steals trash;/ Tis something, nothing;/ Twas mine, tis his, and has been slave to thousands" [7], which is from Othello - also the subject of an opera by Verdi. The third, well-known, line in the quotation was supposed to be a final indication that this was a false trail. Some sources give the setting for this scene as "the garden of the castle", which could be a loose description of the actual hiding-place in Fotheringay.
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