Drama and Theatre Trivia
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90 free Drama and Theatre trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Theatre is the art form that leaves nothing behind. A performance exists for a couple of hours and then survives only in memory, which is why its history is a history of arguments: what Aristotle actually meant, whether boys or women should play the heroines, who gets to censor a script, and what a director is allowed to call a stage. These 90 questions follow that history from the Athenian festivals through the Italian comedians, the Japanese puppet and mask traditions, the penny yards of Elizabethan London and the scandalous first actresses, to the playwrights who rebuilt the form in Scandinavia, Germany, Spain, America and Britain. Alongside them sit the working words of the rehearsal room, the backstage superstitions and the institutions that hand out the prizes and train the next generation. It is pitched for drama students revising their terminology, theatre lovers who want more than musical trivia, and quiz setters who need a rigorous, sourced set with one-line explanations.
30 of 90 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which word for a deceiver comes from the ancient Greek term for a stage actor?
Hypocrite
Hypocrite comes from Greek hypokrites, a stage actor, whose related verb also meant to play a part or pretend, probably how an actor's word came to mean a pretender.
Q 02Which Theban tragedy, Aristotle's model in the Poetics, won only second prize when first staged?
Oedipus Rex
Oedipus Rex supplies Aristotle's example of reversal: the messenger who comes to cheer Oedipus reveals who he is and produces the opposite effect.
Q 03Which comedy was on at Ford's Theatre when Lincoln was shot, the gunshot timed to a laugh line?
Our American Cousin
Our American Cousin gave John Wilkes Booth his chance: the actor learned only that morning that Lincoln would attend that night's performance.
Q 04Which Shakespeare play do superstitious actors refuse to name inside a theatre, for fear of bad luck?
Macbeth
Macbeth's curse comes with a traditional cure: the offender leaves the theatre, turns around three times, spits and swears, then knocks to be let back in.
Q 05Which orange-seller turned comic actress, praised by Pepys, became a mistress of Charles II?
Nell Gwyn
Nell Gwyn went from selling oranges inside the theatre to its stage, and Pepys once found her backstage cursing because so few people were in the pit.
Q 06Which festival was born in 1947 when eight theatre companies turned up uninvited to perform?
Edinburgh Fringe
The Edinburgh Fringe started when eight companies arrived uninvited at the inaugural Edinburgh International Festival and performed anyway, giving the world the term 'fringe theatre'. It now fills the city each summer.
Q 07Which stage direction, the rear of the acting area, gives its name to an actor who steals a scene?
Upstage
Upstage is the part of the stage furthest from the audience, so an actor who drifts there forces scene partners to turn their backs on the house to face them, which is where 'upstaging' comes from.
Q 08What title has a Punch and Judy puppeteer had since Victorian times, often helped by a 'bottler'?
Professor
A professor's booth followed the holiday crowds to the seaside, where Punch and Judy became a staple of British beaches.
Q 09Which Muse, often shown with a tragic mask and buskins, presides over tragedy in Greek mythology?
Melpomene
Melpomene was probably, like all nine Muses, first a goddess of song, and tragedy became hers only later, when the Muses' arts were split up.
Q 10Which Athenian tragedian did Aristotle credit with adding a third actor and painted scenery?
Sophocles
Sophocles's third actor let more characters clash on stage at once, widening the conflicts and plots a tragedy could hold.
Q 11Which Greek tragedian, 'the most tragic of poets' to Aristotle, survives in nineteen plays?
Euripides
Euripides was called 'the most tragic of poets' by Aristotle, probably for his taste for unhappy endings, and nineteen of his plays survive more or less complete, though Rhesus is often doubted. An alphabetical edition survived by luck.
Q 12Which term did Aristotle use for the relief of pity and fear that tragedy works on its audience?
Catharsis
Catharsis first meant physical cleansing, and Aristotle borrowed it for the mind in both the Politics, on music, and the Poetics; its exact sense is still debated.
Q 13Which Poetics term, usually rendered 'tragic flaw', comes from a verb meaning to miss the mark?
Hamartia
Q 21Which Japanese puppet theatre has three black-robed puppeteers work each main figure in full view?
Bunraku
Bunraku was at first the name of one Osaka theatre, named after puppeteer Uemura Bunrakuken, before it came to mean the whole art.
Q 22Who took the female roles on Elizabethan public stages?
Boy players
Boy players stood in because women were kept off England's public stage until the Restoration, when the new royal companies began casting actresses.
Q 23Which penny-paying playgoers stood in the yard of Elizabethan playhouses?
Groundlings
Groundlings took a jab from Shakespeare himself: Hamlet scorns ranting actors who 'split the ears of the groundlings', who, he says, are for the most part capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb shows and noise.
Hamartia derives from hamartanein, 'to miss the mark', and Aristotle meant a morally neutral error of judgement rather than the character defect that 'tragic flaw' implies. Critics have argued over the gap between the two ever since.
Q 14Which comic playwright's The Clouds mocked Socrates so sharply that Plato blamed it for his trial?
Aristophanes
Aristophanes saw The Clouds finish last of three at its 423 BC festival, and he later revised the play after that poor reception.
Q 15Which heroine defies King Creon's decree, buries her brother Polynices and is sent to a living tomb?
Antigone
Antigone places her bond with her dead brother above human law and is walled up alive for it, while her sister Ismene refuses to share the deed. Creon's change of heart comes too late to save her.
Q 16Which morality play has God send Death for its hero, whom only Good Deeds will follow to the grave?
Everyman
Everyman is deserted by Fellowship, Kindred, Goods, Beauty and Strength; only Good Deeds, too weak to stand until he confesses his sins, goes into the grave with him.
Q 17Which Bavarian village first staged its Passion Play in 1634 to keep a vow made during a plague?
Oberammergau
Oberammergau's villagers vowed in 1633, and legend says no one else died of plague after that; the first play was staged in the graveyard, before the victims' graves.
Q 18Which commedia dell'arte servant wears a costume of irregular coloured patches?
Harlequin
Harlequin's name may come from Hellequin, leader of a night-riding troop of demons in French legend, though some scholars doubt the link.
Q 19Which commedia dell'arte character arrived in England as a marionette in 1662 and became Mr Punch?
Pulcinella
Pulcinella reached England with Bologna puppeteer Pietro Gimonde, and Samuel Pepys called his Covent Garden show 'very pretty, the best that ever I saw'.
Q 20Which actor-playwright, taught Noh by his father, refined it at shogun Yoshimitsu's court?
Zeami
Zeami, son of Kan'ami, wrote treatises on Noh's art, but a later shogun, Ashikaga Yoshinori, turned against him and exiled him to Sado Island.
Q 24Which musical's London opening waited until the Lord Chamberlain lost his power to license plays?
Hair
Hair opened at the Shaftesbury Theatre the night after stage censorship ended, and its run there ended only when part of the theatre's ceiling collapsed in 1973.
Q 25Which Webster tragedy has a widow strangled on her brothers' orders for secretly marrying Antonio?
The Duchess of Malfi
The Duchess of Malfi retells a real scandal: Giovanna d'Aragona, Duchess of Amalfi, secretly married her steward, Antonio Beccadelli, after her husband died.
Q 26Which role did Margaret Hughes, often credited as England's first professional actress, become the first woman known to play?
Desdemona
Desdemona went to a woman on 8 December 1660, though no record names who played her that night, and some historians give the honour to Anne Marshall.
Q 27Who in Sheridan's The Rivals is 'as headstrong as an allegory on the banks of Nile'?
Mrs Malaprop
Mrs Malaprop gave English the word 'malapropism' for her slips, such as praising Captain Absolute as 'the very pine-apple of politeness'.
Q 28Which Victorian stage genre, in its strict sense, set its action to orchestral music?
Melodrama
Melodrama, from Greek melos, 'song', later dropped its music, and the word now means any sensational story with exaggerated emotion.
Q 29Which New York-born actor, a London Othello in the 1820s, died on tour in Łódź?
Ira Aldridge
Ira Aldridge left New York for England in 1824 to escape the discrimination black actors faced in the United States, and he made his career in Britain and Europe.
Q 30Which playwright's Miss Julie, with its preface on naturalism, answered Zola's call to arms?
August Strindberg
August Strindberg's Miss Julie premiered in Copenhagen in 1889, but no Swedish theatre staged it until 1906.