Doctor Faustus
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50 free Doctor Faustus trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus gave English literature its most famous bargain: a brilliant scholar, bored with everything he has mastered, trades his soul to Lucifer for power and a demon servant named Mephistopheles. It is a fixture of British literature surveys, and its mix of soaring speeches and slapstick still divides readers over whether Faustus is a hero, a fool or both. This quiz follows the story scene by scene, from the opening soliloquy and the signing of the deed through the court conjurings and the clowning to the last terrible hour. Along the way it tests the lines people quote, the Latin tags, the characters major and minor, and the history around the play: its German source, its first performers, its rival printings and its afterlife on stage and screen. It is written for students revising for a class quiz, for readers working through an anthology, and for anyone curious how much of the scholar's downfall they remember. Every answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In Doctor Faustus, what does Faustus use as ink to sign the deed giving his soul to Lucifer?
His own blood
His own blood congeals before he can finish, so Mephistopheles fetches a pan of hot coals to make it flow again.
Q 02Which legendary beauty does Faustus conjure for his scholars and later take as a lover?
Helen of Troy
Helen of Troy never speaks a word on stage, yet her entrance prompts the most quoted speech in the play, about a face that launched a thousand ships.
Q 03Which personified group does Lucifer parade before Faustus to stop him thinking of repentance?
The Seven Deadly Sins
The Seven Deadly Sins step forward one by one to describe themselves, starting with Pride, and a delighted Faustus says the sight feeds his soul.
Q 04How long must Mephistopheles serve Faustus before Lucifer comes to claim his body and soul?
24 years
24 years of luxury is the price Faustus names himself, and the play races through them so quickly that the whole term seems to pass in an evening.
Q 05In Doctor Faustus, whose dishes and wine cup does an invisible Faustus snatch away at a banquet?
The Pope
The Pope crosses himself in alarm as dish and cup vanish, and Faustus answers with a box on the ear that sends the whole table running.
Q 06At what hour do devils arrive to carry Faustus to hell, ending his final frantic soliloquy?
Midnight
Midnight strikes at the end of a soliloquy that squeezes his whole last hour into a few minutes, the clock sounding eleven, then the half hour, then twelve.
Q 07At which German university, also the school of Shakespeare's Hamlet, is Faustus a celebrated doctor?
Wittenberg
Wittenberg was also where Martin Luther taught and launched the Reformation, a loaded address for a scholar who turns to the devil.
Q 08Which Welsh star played Faustus in a 1967 film of Doctor Faustus that he also co-directed?
Richard Burton
Richard Burton based the film on an Oxford student production he had starred in, and cast Elizabeth Taylor in a wordless role.
Q 09Which pair of spirits keeps visiting Faustus, one urging him to repent and the other to press on?
Two angels
Two angels, one good and one evil, were borrowed from medieval drama, where The Castle of Perseverance gives its hero the same rival advisers.
Q 10Which ancient conqueror's spirit does Faustus conjure at court to impress the Holy Roman Emperor?
Alexander the Great
Alexander the Great appears with his paramour, and the Emperor checks she is genuine by looking for a mole on her neck.
Q 11Which writer's two-part drama Faust, unlike Doctor Faustus, lets its scholar escape damnation?
Goethe
Goethe finished the second part in 1831, and it reached print only after his death in 1832.
Q 12In his last line before devils drag him away, what does Faustus desperately offer to do?
Burn his books
He offers to burn his books, renouncing the learning he once prized above salvation, but the cry comes seconds too late.
Q 13Which black art, called cursed in the prologue, does Faustus choose over all his other studies?
Necromancy
Necromancy strictly means conjuring the dead, yet Faustus later admits his court apparitions are only spirits in the likeness of the famous dead, not their real bodies.
Q 21Which Greek philosopher's logic does Faustus weigh first and cast aside in his opening soliloquy?
Aristotle
Aristotle is dismissed within a few lines: Faustus decides that arguing well is all logic can offer and that he has mastered it already.
Q 22Into what does the horse Faustus sells to a dealer turn when it is ridden into a pond?
A bundle of hay
A bundle of hay, a bottle in the dealer's old-fashioned word, is all he is left sitting on mid-pond after ignoring the one warning Faustus gave him.
Q 23Which body part does a cheated horse dealer pull clean off the sleeping Faustus?
His leg
His leg comes away in the dealer's hands, a conjuring trick that sends the man running and promising forty dollars more to escape arrest.
Q 14What does Faustus make sprout from the head of a knight who mocks him before the Emperor?
A pair of horns
A pair of horns was the Elizabethan badge of a cuckold, so Faustus is joking that the sceptical knight has been betrayed at home.
Q 15What is the first thing Faustus asks Mephistopheles to fetch him once the pact is sealed?
A wife
A wife is a request Mephistopheles dodges: he dismisses marriage as an empty ceremony and brings a devil in a dress, complete with fireworks.
Q 16In which subject did Faustus earn the doctorate that gives Marlowe's Doctor Faustus its title?
Theology
Theology was his field, which sharpens the irony: the scholar best trained to understand damnation is the one who bargains for it.
Q 17Which poetic form, hailed by Ben Jonson as a mighty line, carries Faustus's serious scenes?
Blank verse
Blank verse is kept for Faustus and the devils, while the clowns and servants speak prose, a split the play holds almost throughout.
Q 18Faustus seals his pact with the Latin Consummatum est, the dying words of which biblical figure?
Jesus Christ
Jesus Christ speaks the phrase from the cross in the Latin Gospel of John, so Faustus borrows words of salvation to complete his own damnation.
Q 19Which unnamed figure enters in the final act to beg Faustus to repent, and is tormented for it?
An old man
An old man pleads with him to seek mercy, and Mephistopheles admits he cannot touch the stranger's soul because his faith is too strong.
Q 20Johann Georg Faust, the real conjurer behind Doctor Faustus, reportedly died in what accident?
An alchemy explosion
An alchemy explosion at an inn in Staufen is said to have killed him around 1540, and his enemies took the mangled body as proof the devil had collected.
Q 24Finding Mephistopheles too ugly at first sight, Faustus orders him to return dressed as what?
A Franciscan friar
A Franciscan friar is the disguise he picks, sneering that a holy shape suits a devil best.
Q 25Which servant of Faustus scares a clown with two devils and later inherits his master's goods?
Wagner
Wagner is named heir shortly before the end, and wonders aloud why a dying master would still be feasting with his students.
Q 26Which proverb translates the Latin line Mephistopheles gives for why Lucifer wants more souls?
Misery loves company
Misery loves company is the gist of his Latin tag, and when Faustus asks whether devils feel pain too, he says they suffer as much as human souls.
Q 27Which Italian motto, echoed centuries later in a Doris Day hit, does Faustus quote in Act 1?
Che sera, sera
Che sera, sera is how Faustus shrugs off sin and death, translating it on the spot as what will be, shall be.
Q 28Which device from ancient Greek drama opens and closes Doctor Faustus as a narrator?
A chorus
A chorus introduces Faustus as a scholar of humble birth and returns at the end to draw the moral, never once speaking to another character.
Q 29Which out-of-season treat does Faustus fetch in January for the pregnant Duchess of Vanholt?
Ripe grapes
Ripe grapes arrive within moments, and Faustus explains that a swift spirit picked them on the far side of the globe, where it is summer.
Q 30Which high-flyer of Greek myth does the prologue invoke to foretell the fall of Faustus?
Icarus
Icarus is never named, but the prologue speaks of waxen wings that melt once a clever scholar mounts above his reach.