English Literature Trivia
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100 free English Literature trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
English literature is a thousand years of arguments, feuds, forgeries and accidents. A poet sells the rights to his masterpiece for a few pounds, a playwright is knifed over a bar bill, a novelist vanishes for eleven days, and the most famous opening line in fantasy fiction is scribbled on a blank exam page. The stories behind the canon are as good as anything in it. These fifty questions follow the syllabus from the Anglo-Saxon and medieval poets through the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage, the Restoration and the Augustans, the Romantics and the Victorians, and on to the Irish revival, the modernists and the prize winners of recent decades. Each answer carries the detail that makes it stick, and every one is cited. It suits A-level and GCSE revision, an English degree pub quiz, a book-club evening or anyone who wants to find out how much of the canon they actually remember.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What did William Shakespeare leave his wife Anne Hathaway in his will, in the document's only bequest to her?
The second-best bed
The second-best bed, 'with the furniture', was added to the will on 25 March 1616, a month before Shakespeare died; scholars still argue whether it was a snub or the marital bed.
Q 02Which diarist buried his wine and a Parmesan cheese in his garden to save them from the Great Fire of London?
Samuel Pepys
Samuel Pepys dug the pit with his neighbour Sir William Penn, and his shorthand diary was later transcribed by John Smith, who worked unaware that a key sat in Pepys's own library.
Q 03Which writer's ashes lie in Poets' Corner while his heart was buried in his first wife's grave at Stinsford?
Thomas Hardy
Thomas Hardy had asked to be buried whole in the Stinsford churchyard, and the split was a compromise between his family and those who insisted on a Westminster Abbey funeral.
Q 04Which crime writer vanished for eleven days, surfacing at a Harrogate hotel under her husband's mistress's surname?
Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie signed in as 'Mrs Tressa Neele', Neele being the name of the woman her husband Archie wanted to leave her for, and was found there on 14 December 1926.
Q 05At which Swiss waterfall did Arthur Conan Doyle send Sherlock Holmes to his apparent death, a killing he later undid?
Reichenbach Falls
Reichenbach Falls, above Meiringen, is where Holmes and Moriarty grapple in 'The Final Problem'; public pressure brought the detective back in 'The Adventure of the Empty House'.
Q 06Which Oxford professor, marking exam papers, scribbled 'In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit' on a blank page?
J. R. R. Tolkien
J. R. R. Tolkien recalled the moment in a 1955 letter to W. H. Auden; he had finished the story by late 1932 and lent the manuscript to friends including C. S. Lewis.
Q 07Which novel began at the Villa Diodati in 1816, when a house party agreed that each guest would write a ghost story?
Frankenstein
Frankenstein was the eighteen-year-old Mary Shelley's answer to the challenge, which the host set after the group had read German ghost stories aloud by the fire.
Q 08Which Coleridge poem, begun in an opium dream, was left unfinished when 'a person on business from Porlock' called?
Kubla Khan
Kubla Khan, Coleridge's own note says, came to him in a reverie 'brought on by two grains of Opium' at a farmhouse between Porlock and Linton on the edge of Exmoor.
Q 09Which lexicographer defined 'oats' as a grain that feeds horses in England but supports the people in Scotland?
Samuel Johnson
Samuel Johnson compiled his 42,773-entry Dictionary of the English Language almost single-handedly, with clerks only to copy out the quotations he had marked in books.
Q 10Which George Orwell novel was finished on the Scottish island of Jura while Orwell was ill with tuberculosis?
Nineteen Eighty-Four
Nineteen Eighty-Four was completed in second draft on Jura in November 1948, and Orwell rejected his publisher's blurb calling it 'a thriller mixed up with a love story'.
Q 11Which D. H. Lawrence novel's 1960 obscenity trial had the prosecutor ask jurors whether their servants should read it?
Lady Chatterley's Lover
Lady Chatterley's Lover was cleared by the jury, and Penguin's unexpurgated edition sold its first print run of 200,000 copies on the day of publication, 10 November 1960.
Q 12Which boy uses the conch shell as a horn to gather the survivors in Lord of the Flies, and is elected chief?
Ralph
Ralph is voted chief over Jack, and the conch stands for order until Roger's boulder smashes it and kills Piggy; Faber & Faber took the novel after many publishers had turned it down.
Q 13Which Romantic poet died in Rome at 25, asking for the epitaph 'Here lies one whose name was writ in water'?
John Keats
Q 21Whose 1400 burial in Westminster Abbey, earned as Clerk of Works rather than as a poet, was the first in Poets' Corner?
Geoffrey Chaucer
Geoffrey Chaucer was entitled to the grave as a tenant of the Abbey's close; Nicholas Brigham's tomb of 1556 and Edmund Spenser's burial nearby in 1599 began the tradition.
Q 22Which Arthurian poem's hero wears a lady's silk sash back to Camelot as a badge of failure?
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight survives in a single manuscript alongside Pearl, Cleanness and Patience, all thought to be by one anonymous 'Gawain Poet' of the North-West Midlands.
Q 23Which Dean of St Paul's wrote 'No man is an island' in meditations composed while recovering from a grave illness?
John Keats had qualified as an apothecary in 1816 before choosing poetry, and his three volumes sold perhaps 200 copies in his lifetime.
Q 14Which Elizabethan playwright was stabbed to death in a Deptford house, reportedly in a quarrel over the bill?
Christopher Marlowe
Christopher Marlowe was stabbed above the right eye by Ingram Frizer, the coroner's inquest found, after the two argued over 'the Reckoning' at the widow Eleanor Bull's house in 1593.
Q 15A misfiring stage cannon during which Shakespeare play burned the Globe Theatre to the ground on 29 June 1613?
Henry VIII
Henry VIII was being staged when the cannon set the wooden beams and thatch alight; the Globe had been built in 1599 from the timbers of an earlier Shoreditch playhouse, and a second Globe stood on the site by June 1614.
Q 16Which Samuel Beckett play, 'nothing happens, twice' to one critic, has Vladimir and Estragon linger by a leafless tree?
Waiting for Godot
Waiting for Godot was written in French as En attendant Godot in 1948–49, and the critic Vivian Mercier's quip noted that its second act is a subtly different reprise of the first.
Q 17Which Irish playwright was the first person to win both a Nobel Prize and an Oscar, the Oscar for adapting Pygmalion?
George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw called the 1938 Academy Award for the Pygmalion screenplay an insult coming from Hollywood, having accepted the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925.
Q 18In Beowulf, what creature deals the hero his fatal wound fifty years after he has killed Grendel and Grendel's mother?
A dragon
A dragon, roused when a slave steals a golden cup from its hoard, mortally wounds Beowulf, and of all his men only his kinsman Wiglaf stays to help him kill it.
Q 19Which Whitby cowherd, says Bede, learned to compose in a dream, becoming the earliest English poet known by name?
Cædmon
Cædmon, in Bede's account, was asked in the dream by a stranger to sing of 'the beginning of created things', and his short Hymn is among the oldest surviving Old English verse.
Q 20Which Canterbury Tales pilgrim tells of a knight who must learn, in a year and a day, what women most desire?
The Wife of Bath
The Wife of Bath's knight is told the answer by an old woman he must then marry: women most desire sovereignty over their husbands and lovers.
John Donne
John Donne wrote the Devotions upon Emergent Occasions in December 1623, a section for each day of an illness thought to be relapsing fever or typhus, two years into his time as Dean.
Q 24Which epic did John Milton dictate after going blind, selling the publishing rights for an initial £5?
Paradise Lost
Paradise Lost earned Milton £5 from Samuel Simmons in April 1667, with another £5 due as each print run of up to 1,500 copies sold out; he had composed it entirely by dictation, having lost his sight in 1652.
Q 25Which Shakespeare tragedy, his longest play, has a Danish prince avenge a father murdered by his uncle Claudius?
Hamlet
Hamlet, written between 1599 and 1601, survives in three early texts, each including lines and passages missing from the others, which editors have argued over ever since.
Q 26Which Shakespeare comedy has Puck give the weaver Nick Bottom a donkey's head in a wood outside Athens?
A Midsummer Night's Dream
A Midsummer Night's Dream has Puck turn Bottom's head into a donkey's mid-rehearsal, and the enchanted fairy queen Titania falls in love with him the moment she wakes.
Q 27Which two actors from Shakespeare's company compiled the First Folio, the first printing of eighteen of his plays?
Heminges and Condell
John Heminges and Henry Condell dismissed the earlier quartos as 'stol'n and surreptitious copies', and their 1623 Folio of 36 plays is the only reliable text for about 20 of them.
Q 28Which Dublin dean's satire A Modest Proposal suggested the Irish poor sell their infants as food for the rich?
Jonathan Swift
Jonathan Swift, Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral from 1713, deadpans that a well-nursed year-old child is 'a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled'.
Q 29Which poet engraved, printed and hand-coloured his Songs of Innocence and of Experience, which includes 'The Tyger'?
William Blake
William Blake invented relief etching in 1788, aged 31, and used it for most of his books, combining words and pictures on a single plate in the manner of medieval illuminated manuscripts.
Q 30Which Percy Shelley sonnet, written in friendly competition with Horace Smith, mocks a ruined colossus of Ramesses II?
Ozymandias
Ozymandias is the Greek name for Ramesses II, and both poets took the inscription 'King of Kings Ozymandias am I' from the historian Diodorus Siculus; Shelley's version appeared in The Examiner in January 1818.