Shakespeare Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

Which history play shows the former wild prince, now a sober king, invading France to press a claim to its throne, walking in disguise among his soldiers the night before a great battle, and winning against overwhelming odds at Agincourt?

Question 2

Which 1998 film imagines a young, blocked Shakespeare finding inspiration for Romeo and Juliet in a love affair with a noblewoman who disguises herself as a boy to act on the all-male stage, and won the Academy Award for best picture?

Question 3

Which tragedy, traditionally so unlucky that actors will not say its title inside a theatre, follows a victorious Scottish general who, spurred by a prophecy from three witches and by his ambitious wife, murders the king who is a guest under his roof and takes the crown?

Question 4

Which comic actor, a sharer in Shakespeare's early company famous for his improvised jigs and clowning, is thought to have played parts like Dogberry and Bottom, left the company around 1599, and then morris-danced the roughly hundred miles from London to Norwich over nine days as a publicity stunt he wrote up in a pamphlet?

Question 5

Which playwright, born the same year as Shakespeare, wrote Doctor Faustus and Tamburlaine, was reportedly a government spy, and was stabbed to death above the eye in a dispute over the bill at a house in Deptford in 1593, aged 29?

Question 6

The soliloquy beginning to be, or not to be, that is the question, weighing the pain of living against the fear of what dreams may come in the sleep of death, the undiscovered country from which no traveller returns, comes from which play?

Question 7

Which late romance begins as a tragedy, with a king seized by a groundless jealousy who accuses his pregnant wife of adultery, causes the death of his son and, he believes, his wife, and orders the newborn girl abandoned on a distant shore?

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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.