Shakespeare Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

What is the name for the group of ten Shakespeare plays in the First Folio that dramatise the reigns of English kings, running from Richard the Second through the Henry the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth plays to Richard the Third, plus King John and Henry the Eighth?

Question 2

Which character, described in the cast list as a savage and deformed slave, is the son of the dead witch Sycorax and the only native of the island, forced by the sorcerer who now rules it to fetch wood and carry water?

Question 3

Which fat, boastful, cowardly and endlessly witty old knight is the drinking companion and bad influence of Prince Hal in the two parts of Henry the Fourth, and delivers a battlefield speech concluding that the better part of valour is discretion?

Question 4

In which Warwickshire market town was Shakespeare born in 1564, the son of a glove-maker and town official, and to which did he return in prosperity, buying the second-largest house in the place, and die in 1616 on or about his 52nd birthday?

Question 5

Which melancholy, world-weary lord in the Forest of Arden delivers the speech declaring that all the world is a stage and all the men and women merely players, who make their exits and their entrances and each play many parts in one lifetime?

Question 6

What is the name for a speech delivered by a character who is alone on the stage, or believes themselves to be, giving the audience direct access to their private thoughts and feelings?

Question 7

Which heiress of Belmont, bound by her dead father's will to marry whichever suitor chooses the right one of three caskets, disguises herself as a young male lawyer to defend her husband's friend in a Venetian court?

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About Shakespeare

This quiz is about William Shakespeare: the plays, the characters, the famous lines, the sonnets, the theatre he worked in, the little that is known of his life, and the four centuries of performance and myth that followed. Eighty questions, each describing a play, a character, a quotation, a stage term, a biographical fact or an adaptation, and asking you to name it from four choices, then explaining it.

The first pack is the essentials: the four great tragedies, Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello and King Lear, and Romeo and Juliet; the comedies A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night and The Tempest; the histories Julius Caesar and Richard the Third; the Globe, the soliloquy, iambic pentameter and the First Folio; and the facts of Stratford, Anne Hathaway, the sonnets, Falstaff and the three-way division of the plays.

The second pack widens out to Much Ado, As You Like It, The Taming of the Shrew, Henry the Fifth, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, Measure for Measure, The Winter's Tale, Cymbeline, Richard the Second, Titus Andronicus, Pericles, Troilus and Cressida and The Comedy of Errors; the characters Puck, Lady Macbeth, Prospero, Malvolio, Caliban, Ophelia, Mercutio and Portia; and the world of the theatre, the groundlings, the King's Men, the upstart-crow attack, the lost years, the Bad Quartos, the authorship question, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, the clowns Kemp and Armin, the tragedian Burbage, the Blackfriars, the problem plays and the Chorus.

The third pack tests famous lines and Shakespeare's afterlife: to be or not to be; friends, Romans, countrymen; all the world's a stage; tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow; the Queen Mab speech; exit pursued by a bear; the counsellor on brevity; the Royal Shakespeare Company; the rained-out Garrick Jubilee of 1769; Kurosawa's samurai versions; West Side Story and other musicals; the film Shakespeare in Love; the reconstructed Globe; the word bardolatry; the lost play Cardenio; and the everyday phrases the plays gave the language.

The wrong answers are always other Shakespeare plays, characters or terms of the same kind, so a shaky guess is easily caught and a sure one is quickly confirmed. Because every option is Shakespearean, a neutral picture, a shelf of old books, a library, a quill and inkwell, an old typewriter, is equally consistent with all four choices and cannot point to any one of them, so about fifteen questions carry one purely for atmosphere.

No knowledge of the theatre is assumed beyond what a reader picks up at school or from seeing a few productions. The quiz leans on the plays everyone half-remembers and the lines that have escaped into ordinary speech, and it uses the explanations to join the dots between them, the companies, the playhouses and the man from Stratford. Plot summaries, quotations, names and dates have been checked against standard editions and reference works.