Shakespeare Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

Which minor figure in Julius Caesar calls out from the crowd to warn the title character to beware the fifteenth of March, is brushed aside as a dreamer, and on the fatal morning itself is told by Caesar that the day has come, only to reply that it has come but is not gone?

Question 2

Which comedy sends a banished duke, his witty daughter, and a string of other exiles into the Forest of Arden, where the daughter, disguised as a young man, gives her infatuated suitor lessons in how to woo her, not knowing it is herself?

Question 3

What is the name for the metre of most of Shakespeare's verse dialogue, a line of ten syllables falling into five pairs, each an unstressed beat followed by a stressed one, and usually left unrhymed?

Question 4

Which comedy moves from the court of Athens into a moonlit wood where the king and queen of the fairies are quarrelling, a mischievous sprite squeezes a love potion into the eyes of sleeping mortals and gets the wrong ones, and a weaver rehearsing a play is given the head of a donkey?

Question 5

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?

Question 6

Which witty, volatile friend of Romeo delivers a fantastical speech about Queen Mab, the fairies' tiny midwife who gallops through sleepers' brains, and is killed in a street brawl when Romeo steps between him and his attacker?

Question 7

Which play, thought to be the last Shakespeare wrote alone, opens with a ship breaking up in a storm that has been raised by magic, and takes place entirely on an island ruled by a sorcerer who was once Duke of Milan until his brother deposed him?

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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.