Hamlet Trivia
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99 free Hamlet trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Hamlet trivia quiz covers Shakespeare's longest play from every angle: the plot and its body count, the characters from Claudius and Gertrude to Yorick and Fortinbras, the famous lines and who actually says them, the medieval Amleth legend and the lost Ur-Hamlet behind it, and the three very different early texts. It also takes in the play's afterlife on stage and screen, from Sarah Bernhardt and Richard Burbage to Olivier's Oscar-winning film, Branagh's four-hour uncut version, Mel Gibson, Ethan Hawke, David Tennant, Benedict Cumberbatch, The Lion King and Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. About a third of the questions are answerable by anyone who studied the play at school, a third are medium, and the rest are for people who know their Second Quarto from their First Folio. It works equally well as a literature-class quiz or a pub round. Every answer has been checked against an encyclopaedic source and each question links to the page that confirms it.
30 of 99 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What is the play's full title?
The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
The full title is The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark; the 1623 First Folio prints it as 'The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke', while the early quartos call it a 'Tragicall Historie'.
Q 02Who has murdered Hamlet's father and married his mother?
Claudius, his uncle
Marcellus's line about something being 'rotten in the state of Denmark' is usually read as pointing at this fratricide.
Q 03What is the name of Hamlet's mother?
Gertrude
Gertrude, Hamlet's mother and Queen of Denmark, remarried her dead husband's brother within two months, prompting Hamlet's 'Frailty, thy name is woman' in his first soliloquy.
Q 04Which friend does the dying Hamlet charge to stay alive and tell his story?
Horatio
Horatio, Hamlet's fellow student and confidant, is told to 'absent thee from felicity awhile' and report the cause aright; he is left alive to do so at the end.
Q 05How does Hamlet kill the king's eavesdropping counsellor?
Stabbing him through a wall hanging
Polonius is eavesdropping on Hamlet and Gertrude behind an arras when he cries out; Hamlet stabs wildly, thinking it might be the king.
Q 06How does Ophelia die?
She drowns
Gertrude reports that a willow branch broke and dropped her into the brook; a 1569 coroner's report on a drowned girl called Jane Shaxspere may have inspired it.
Q 07Where does Ophelia's brother go at the start of the play, before returning in a rage in Act 4?
France
Ophelia's brother goes back to France; their father later sends the servant Reynaldo to Paris to check on how his son is behaving there.
Q 08Who is Ophelia's brother, who fights Hamlet in the final duel?
Laertes
Laertes, Ophelia's brother, fences Hamlet with an unbated, venom-tipped rapier; the weapons change hands in a scuffle and both men die of the same poison.
Q 09Which two old friends are sent to spy on Hamlet and later escort him to England?
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, summoned by the king to sound Hamlet out, carry sealed orders for his execution in England; Hamlet rewrites the commission so they die instead.
Q 10What is the title of the play Hamlet has the travelling actors perform to test Claudius's guilt?
The Murder of Gonzago
Hamlet asks the players for The Murder of Gonzago, inserting a dozen lines of his own, and tells the king it is called 'The Mousetrap'; the king halts the performance.
Q 11Why does Hamlet decide NOT to kill the king when he catches him alone and unarmed?
He is praying
He reasons that killing a man at prayer would send him to heaven; ironically Claudius admits he cannot truly repent.
Q 12Whom does the dying Hamlet name as his successor to the Danish throne?
Fortinbras
Fortinbras, the Norwegian prince, receives Hamlet's 'dying voice' for the election and marches in as the play ends to claim the kingdom and order a soldier's funeral.
Q 13Whose skull does Hamlet hold in the graveyard scene?
Yorick's
Yorick, the old king's jester who once carried the boy Hamlet on his back, has lain in the earth 23 years, by the gravedigger's count, when his skull is turned up.
Q 21Which 13th-century chronicler's 'Life of Amleth' is the play's main legendary source?
Saxo Grammaticus
Saxo Grammaticus told the Amleth story in Books III and IV of his Latin Gesta Danorum (c. 1200); his prince also feigns madness and kills an eavesdropper in his mother's chamber.
Q 22Which 2022 Robert Eggers film retells the Amleth legend with Alexander Skarsgård?
The Northman
Amleth is the son of Horvendill, king of the Jutes, in Saxo's telling; Eggers co-wrote the script with the Icelandic author Sjón.
Q 23What do scholars call the lost earlier play, possibly by Kyd, that Shakespeare may have reworked?
The Ur-Hamlet
Q 14Which pianist left his skull to the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1982 hoping it would be used as Yorick?
André Tchaikowsky
André Tchaikowsky, a Polish-born pianist and composer, bequeathed his skull to the RSC on his death in 1982; David Tennant finally held it in the graveyard scene of the 2008 production.
Q 15At what point in the play does Hamlet deliver 'To be, or not to be'?
Act 3, Scene 1
It's the 'nunnery scene': Ophelia is on stage waiting, and Claudius and Polonius are hidden nearby listening.
Q 16How does the 'bad' First Quarto of 1603 mangle the opening of the famous soliloquy?
'To be, or not to be, aye there's the point'
Q1 of 1603 prints 'To be, or not to be, aye there's the point' (spelled 'I'), placing the speech earlier in the action; at about 2,200 lines it is roughly 60 percent of the Second Quarto.
Q 17Which character gives the advice 'Neither a borrower nor a lender be' and 'To thine own self be true'?
Polonius
He's also the source of 'Brevity is the soul of wit', which is funny coming from the most long-winded man in the play.
Q 18Roughly how many lines does a conflated modern text of Hamlet, Shakespeare's longest play, run to?
About 3,900
A conflated modern text runs to about 3,900 lines (counts vary by edition, some reaching 4,000), roughly 30,000 words; an uncut staging lasts well over four hours.
Q 19How many early printed versions of Hamlet survive, each with lines the others lack?
Three
Three survive: the First Quarto of 1603, the Second Quarto of 1604 and the First Folio of 1623; Q2 has around 230 lines absent from the Folio, which in turn adds about 70 of its own.
Q 20When did Shakespeare most likely write Hamlet?
Between 1599 and 1601
It isn't in Francis Meres's 1598 list of Shakespeare's plays, and it alludes to Julius Caesar, dated to mid-1599.
The Ur-Hamlet is known only from allusions: Thomas Nashe mocked 'whole Hamlets' of tragical speeches in 1589, and Thomas Lodge in 1596 recalled a ghost crying 'Hamlet, revenge'.
Q 24What was the name of Shakespeare's only son, who died in 1596 aged eleven?
Hamnet
Hamnet Shakespeare, twin of Judith, was buried in Stratford in August 1596; Hamnet and Hamlet were interchangeable spellings then, and Stephen Greenblatt links the father's grief to the tragedy.
Q 25Which German university city do Hamlet and his student friends attend?
Wittenberg
Wittenberg, the university to which Hamlet asks to return, was Martin Luther's town, famous for the Ninety-five Theses of 1517; Marlowe's Doctor Faustus is a Wittenberg scholar too.
Q 26Which real Danish castle is the Elsinore of the play?
Kronborg
Kronborg, the castle at Helsingør on the narrowest point of the Øresund, is the play's Elsinore; a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2000, it was rebuilt after a fire in 1629.
Q 27For which leading actor of his company did Shakespeare almost certainly write the role of Hamlet?
Richard Burbage
Burbage was the star of the Lord Chamberlain's Men, and the play was described in 1602 as 'latelie Acted' by them.
Q 28Which French actress famously played the prince in London in 1899 and filmed the fencing scene in 1900?
Sarah Bernhardt
Sarah Bernhardt played the prince in Paris and London in 1899 and filmed the duel in 1900 for the Phono-Cinéma-Théâtre, the earliest known Hamlet on film; Asta Nielsen followed in 1921.
Q 29Whose 1948 black-and-white Hamlet won Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Actor?
Laurence Olivier
Laurence Olivier directed and starred, winning Best Actor while the film became the first British production to take Best Picture; Olivier was the first person to direct himself to an acting Oscar.
Q 30The 1948 film's prologue calls Hamlet the tragedy of a man who could not do what?
Make up his mind
The 1948 film's opening voice-over declares 'This is the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind', announcing the indecisive reading its heavily cut text pursues.