Today’s theme answers are three-word quotes, with the most important word appearing right in the middle of each one.
- 22A: [*“Get cracking!”] is “GO TO IT!”
- 23A: [*“We don’t need to sugarcoat it”] is “LET’S BE REAL.”
- 33A: [*“I want candy!”] is “TRICK OR TREAT!”
- 36A: [*“We’re close by”] is “IT’S NOT FAR.”
- 49A: [*“Let me count the ways”] is “WHERE TO BEGIN.”
- 65A: [*“Lucky you”] is “MUST BE NICE.”
- 69A: [*“Knock it off!”] is “CUT THAT OUT!”
- 87A: [*“How can you tell them apart?”] is “WHICH IS WHICH?”
- 100A: [*“Floor it!”] is “HIT THE GAS!”
- 103A: [*“I have to ask …”] is “MY QUESTION IS …”
The dual revealers are at 115A: [Marking in the middle of the road … or an alternate title for this puzzle] (CENTER LINE) and 119A: [Speaker of the quote that’s found in the middle of the starred answers] (HAMLET). Take the words in the middle of each starred theme answer and you spell out “TO BE OR NOT TO BE, THAT IS THE QUESTION.”
This puzzle had an odd evolution. My debut New York Times crossword back in October 2013 was also inspired by Hamlet’s soliloquy. In that puzzle, I took phrases with “TO BE” and squashed them into rebus squares, but with the twist that the Down answers crossed those squares with “BB,” or literally “two B’s.” The solution as I envisaged it showed the trick squares as “2B,” and the answer right in the middle of the grid was 2B OR NOT 2B.
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I wanted to revisit the same quote for another theme, but I ran into a couple of fatal flaws along the way. The original idea was to hide the quote in a more subtle way, like in phrases such as ROBERTO BENIGNI, FOR NOTHING, SACRAMENTO BEE, and so on. I had to scrap that plan once I got to QUESTION. You can’t hide that word in a two-word phrase in the same way unless you break it up into chunks like with ANTIQUE STORE and RADIO NOISE, which felt like too much of an inconsistency for comfort.
I figured it would be simpler to just find real phrases where the key words were in the middle. That’s when the other fatal flaw reared its ugly head. At first the revealer was going to be INNER MONOLOGUE — the words are stashed inside longer quotes, it’s the opening of Hamlet’s famous monologue … sounds perfect, right? The problem is that it’s not a monologue, but rather a soliloquy. They’re both performed by a single character, but a monologue is spoken to another person onstage or to the audience as part of a regular conversation, whereas a soliloquy is the character’s inner thoughts spoken only to themselves — thinking out loud, basically. Still, I caught that problem before I built INNER MONOLOGUE into the grid itself. After that, it was just a matter of finding three-word quotes where the key words were directly in the middle, with an equal number of letters for the first and third words. The trickiest find was MY QUESTION IS since that didn’t show up in any databases that I consulted.
Since 11 years have passed between the first “to be or not to be” puzzle and this one, I assume my next “to be or not to be” puzzle will be in 2035. I guess I’d better start planning that now.
What did you think?
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