King Lear Trivia
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50 free King Lear trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
King Lear is the bleakest of Shakespeare's tragedies and, many would say, the greatest, and this quiz covers it from the first scene to the last. It follows the plot closely: the love test, Cordelia's nothing, the suitors from Burgundy and France, Kent's banishment and disguise, the hundred knights, the storm on the heath, Edmund's forged letter, Edgar as Poor Tom, the blinding of Gloucester, the imaginary cliff at Dover, the poisoned sister and the hanging in the prison. Then it steps back to the making and afterlife of the play: the legendary Leir who founded Leicester, Holinshed and Geoffrey of Monmouth, Sidney's Arcadia, the anonymous King Leir, the eclipses of 1605, the first recorded performance at court, Richard Burbage, the two very different texts of 1608 and 1623, and the astonishing 150 years in which Nahum Tate's happy-ending version drove Shakespeare's off the stage. It closes with Lear on screen and page: Peter Brook and Paul Scofield, Kozintsev, Olivier, Kurosawa's Ran, Anthony Hopkins, Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres and the novels that keep retelling it. Easy questions suit anyone who has read the play at school; the expert tier is for Shakespeare scholars. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the play, its characters and adaptations, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What must King Lear's daughters profess to earn their shares of his kingdom?
Love
Love. Goneril and Regan flatter him and get a third each, while Cordelia, the one who truly loves him, will not compete and is disowned.
Q 02What is Cordelia's one-word reply when Lear asks what she can say to earn a richer share?
Nothing
Nothing. Lear tells her to speak again, and when she still will not flatter him he disowns her and splits her share between her two sisters.
Q 03Which suitor marries Cordelia even after Lear strips her of her dowry?
The King of France
The King of France. Burgundy backs out the moment the dowry is gone, but France declares that she is herself a dowry and carries her off to be his queen.
Q 04In King Lear, the king says it is 'sharper than a serpent's tooth' to have what?
A thankless child
A thankless child. Lear means Goneril, the first daughter to turn on him, and in the same speech he prays that she will be barren.
Q 05Regan, King Lear's middle daughter, is married to which duke?
Cornwall
Cornwall. He and Regan are well matched in cruelty: he puts out the Earl of Gloucester's eyes for helping the king, and she urges him on.
Q 06What does King Lear insist on keeping when he abdicates?
A hundred knights
A hundred knights. Goneril and Regan whittle the number down until Regan asks why he needs even one, and Lear walks out on them both rather than give way.
Q 07Which nobleman, banished for defending Cordelia, returns in disguise to serve King Lear?
Earl of Kent
The Earl of Kent. He takes the name Caius and gets himself hired by the very king who banished him, and tells Lear who he is only in the final scene.
Q 08What punishment do Regan and her husband give King Lear's messenger for brawling with Oswald?
They put him in the stocks
They put him in the stocks. It is a punishment for petty thieves, so using it on the king's own messenger is a deliberate insult, and Lear calls it worse than murder.
Q 09Edmund, the Earl of Gloucester's illegitimate son, turns his father against his brother Edgar using what?
A forged letter
A forged letter. Edmund makes a show of hiding it, lets his father demand to read it, and Gloucester finds what looks like Edgar plotting to kill him for his estate.
Q 10In King Lear, the fugitive Edgar disguises himself as a mad beggar under what name?
Tom o' Bedlam
Tom o' Bedlam. Edgar grimes his face with filth and wears only a blanket, and the disguise is so complete that he later guides his own blinded father unrecognised.
Q 11Where does King Lear end up raging after his daughters shut their doors on him?
On a heath in a storm
On a heath in a storm. Lear shouts back at the thunder and dares the weather to do its worst, until his Fool and a loyal servant coax him into a hovel.
Q 12Which philosopher's Essays, translated by John Florio in 1603, are among King Lear's possible sources?
Montaigne
Montaigne. Shakespeare seems to have read Florio's translation closely: he went back to it for The Tempest, where an old lord's dream of a perfect commonwealth follows the essay on cannibals.
Q 13Who mortally wounds Regan's husband as he gouges out Gloucester's eyes?
One of his own servants
Q 21In medieval legend, King Leir, the model for Shakespeare's Lear, founded which English city?
Leicester
Leicester. The name really goes back to an early tribe, the Ligore, perhaps called after a local river; the same chronicle has Leir's father Bladud founding Bath.
Q 22Whose Chronicles gave Shakespeare the Lear story as well as Macbeth, Cymbeline and many of his history plays?
Raphael Holinshed
Raphael Holinshed. He was hired to help write a history of the whole world; when its printer died the plan shrank to the British Isles, and the result became Shakespeare's favourite quarry.
Q 23The Gloucester subplot of King Lear, a blinded father and two sons, comes from which Elizabethan prose romance?
Sidney's Arcadia
One of his own servants. The man has served him since boyhood and cannot watch any longer; he wounds his master, and Regan stabs him from behind for it.
Q 14Edgar tricks the suicidal Gloucester into believing he has survived a leap from what?
The cliffs of Dover
The cliffs of Dover. Edgar describes the dizzying drop so vividly that his blind father believes it, falls forward on flat ground, and is told he survived by a miracle.
Q 15In King Lear, blinded Gloucester says the gods kill men for sport as 'wanton boys' kill what?
Flies
Flies. Gloucester says it at his lowest, newly blinded and sure the son he wronged is lost to him, while that son stands beside him unrecognised.
Q 16How does Regan die in King Lear?
Poisoned by Goneril
Poisoned by Goneril. Both sisters want Edmund, and Goneril would sooner kill her own sister than lose him; Regan sickens just as she announces she will marry him.
Q 17What happens to Goneril after Edmund is mortally wounded in King Lear?
She kills herself offstage
She kills herself offstage. Albany has just confronted her with her own letter plotting his murder, and rather than answer for it she runs off and stabs herself.
Q 18How does Edgar finally bring down his treacherous half-brother Edmund in King Lear?
In a trial by combat
In a trial by combat. Edgar answers the herald's trumpet in armour with his face hidden, strikes Edmund down, and only then says who he is.
Q 19How does Cordelia die in King Lear?
Hanged in prison
Hanged in prison. Edmund ordered it made to look like suicide, and his dying change of heart comes minutes too late: Lear walks in carrying her body.
Q 20Which 12th-century writer first recorded Leir, the legendary British king behind Shakespeare's King Lear?
Geoffrey of Monmouth
Geoffrey of Monmouth. He claimed his history was translated from a very old British book, a claim historians dismiss as invention, and the same work launched King Arthur into European literature.
Sidney's Arcadia. In Sidney's tale a king loses his throne and his sight to a scheming bastard son, and the loyal son he had cast off leads him about as a beggar.
Q 24How does Shakespeare's King Lear end for the old king himself?
He dies of grief
He dies of grief. Lear carries in his dead daughter and dies moments later, still searching her lips for a sign of breath.
Q 25In King Lear, which recent omens does Gloucester blame for the kingdom's troubles, a clue to the play's date?
Eclipses
Eclipses. 'These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us,' he says, and a lunar and a solar eclipse really did fall about two weeks apart in autumn 1605.
Q 26King Lear's earliest recorded performance was a Christmas show at court for which monarch?
James I
James I. The court watched a king break Britain apart on St Stephen's night 1606, three years after James had joined the crowns of England and Scotland.
Q 27Shakespeare wrote the role of Lear for which leading tragedian of his company?
Richard Burbage
Richard Burbage. He was also the first Hamlet, Othello and Macbeth, and when he died an elegy mourned 'kind Lear' among the characters who had died with him.
Q 28King Lear's Fool may have been written for which comic actor of Shakespeare's company?
Robert Armin
Robert Armin. He took over from the knockabout clown Will Kempe, and Shakespeare's fools changed to suit him, turning sharp-tongued and often wiser than their masters.
Q 29Since the 1700s, how have most editors treated the differing 1608 and 1623 texts of King Lear?
Merged them
Merged them. The Folio drops about 300 of the quarto's lines, a whole scene among them, and adds about 100 of its own, so editors long blended the two into a play that matches neither.
Q 30Which writer's 1681 King Lear had a happy ending and an Edgar–Cordelia romance?
Nahum Tate
Nahum Tate. He called Shakespeare's play a heap of jewels, unstrung and unpolished, so he cut the Fool and rewarded the good, and for a century and a half audiences saw only his version.