Macbeth Trivia
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118 free Macbeth trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
61 free Macbeth trivia questions with answers. Sixty-one questions on Macbeth, Shakespeare's shortest and darkest tragedy. The first stretch is the play itself: the titles the witches promise, who flees where after Duncan's murder, the apparitions, the moving wood, the man not of woman born, and the lines that have leaked into everyday English. Then it widens out to the play's making, from Holinshed and King James's interest in witchcraft to the Porter's Gunpowder Plot jokes and the scholars' arguments about who wrote Hecate. The second half is for people who know the play and want the world around it: the historical Macbeth who ruled Scotland for seventeen years and went on pilgrimage, the actors and adaptations that shaped how it is staged, the Astor Place riot, the Voodoo Macbeth, and the films by Welles, Kurosawa, Polanski, Kurzel and Joel Coen. It suits students revising the text as well as pub-quiz teams and theatre people who refuse to say the name aloud. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the play, its characters and its adaptations, and the sentence that establishes it is shown under each explanation.
30 of 118 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Macbeth is only slightly more than half the length of which other Shakespeare tragedy?
Hamlet
Hamlet runs almost twice as long, and Macbeth's brevity has led many critics to suspect that the version we have was cut down for performance.
Q 02Every modern edition of Shakespeare's Macbeth is based on which early printed text?
The First Folio of 1623
The First Folio of 1623 is the base because no quarto of Macbeth appeared before the Folio, so every later text descends from that one printing.
Q 03Whose novel borrows its title, 'Something Wicked This Way Comes', from Macbeth?
Ray Bradbury
Ray Bradbury took it for his 1962 carnival novel, and the couplet's first half, 'By the pricking of my thumbs', titled a 1968 Agatha Christie mystery.
Q 04Shakespeare took the story of Macbeth mainly from which 1587 history book?
Holinshed's Chronicles
Holinshed's Chronicles made Banquo an accomplice in Duncan's murder, but Shakespeare made him innocent, since the reigning king was thought to descend from Banquo.
Q 05Astrologer Simon Forman's notes record seeing Macbeth performed at which London playhouse?
The Globe
The Globe, where Forman saw it, burned down in 1613 when a stage cannon fired during a performance set its thatched roof alight.
Q 06Which monarch, patron of Shakespeare's company, wrote a treatise on witchcraft called Daemonologie?
James I
James I believed witches had raised storms to sink his ship as he sailed home with his Danish bride, and he questioned accused witches himself at the North Berwick trials.
Q 07Macbeth's Porter welcoming an 'equivocator' is read as alluding to Jesuit Henry Garnet's trial after which event?
The Gunpowder Plot
The Gunpowder Plot led to Garnet's trial, where he defended 'equivocation', and one of his aliases was Farmer, so the Porter's farmer who hanged himself looks topical too.
Q 08Hecate is widely thought to have been added by a later hand, possibly which fellow dramatist?
Thomas Middleton
Two songs cued in the play appear in full in his own witch play The Witch, which is the main clue to the interpolation.
Q 09Which paradox do Macbeth's three witches chant?
Fair is foul, and foul is fair
Fair is foul, and foul is fair, they chant, and Macbeth's very first line echoes them: 'So foul and fair a day I have not seen.'
Q 10At the start of the play, Macbeth already holds the title Thane of which place?
Glamis
Glamis Castle, famous from the play, dates only from the 14th century, long after the real Macbeth died, and was later the Queen Mother's childhood home.
Q 11Which title does King Duncan take from a traitor and give to Macbeth?
Thane of Cawdor
Thane of Cawdor is the news that arrives moments after the witches foretold it, and Macbeth muses that 'two truths are told' as prologue to the crown.
Q 12The rebellion Macbeth and Banquo crush at the play's opening is allied with invaders from which kingdom?
Norway
Norway's defeated king, Sweno, is not allowed to bury his dead until he pays Scotland ten thousand dollars at Saint Colme's Inch.
Q 13Duncan spends his fatal night as a guest at Macbeth's castle in which town?
Inverness
Inverness is where Duncan dies under Macbeth's roof, and Shakespeare took that host-kills-guest plot from an older story of Donwald murdering King Duff.
Q 21Macduff holds which Scottish title?
Thane of Fife
Thane of Fife echoes the real MacDuffs, Earls of Fife, whose chiefs had the right to enthrone Scotland's kings, and a MacDuff crowned Robert the Bruce in 1306.
Q 22Why can Macduff kill Macbeth despite the 'of woman born' prophecy?
He was delivered by Caesarean section
He was delivered by Caesarean section, and on hearing it Macbeth at first refuses to fight, until Macduff threatens to put him on public show as a tyrant.
Q 23What does Macduff carry on stage to Malcolm in the final scene?
Macbeth's severed head
Q 14Duncan names his son Malcolm heir to the throne by giving him what title?
Prince of Cumberland
Prince of Cumberland puts Malcolm between Macbeth and the crown, and Macbeth's aside calls it 'a step on which I must fall down, or else o'erleap'.
Q 15Whom does Macbeth kill right after Duncan's body is found, before they can protest innocence?
The king's servants
The king's servants were the men Lady Macbeth had smeared with blood, and Macbeth claims fury made him kill them, silencing the men he had framed.
Q 16After Duncan's murder Malcolm flees to England, but where does his brother Donalbain go?
Ireland
Ireland is where Donalbain goes, but the brothers' flight 'puts upon them suspicion of the deed', and Macbeth is soon named king.
Q 17What is the name of Banquo's son, who escapes the ambush that kills his father?
Fleance
Fleance escaping keeps alive the witches' promise that Banquo will father kings, so Macbeth calls him 'the worm that's fled'.
Q 18Banquo's ghost appears to Macbeth during which occasion?
A royal banquet
A royal banquet is where the ghost takes Macbeth's own seat, and because only he can see it, his guests watch their king rave at an empty chair.
Q 19In Macbeth's show of eight kings descended from Banquo, what does the final king hold?
A mirror
A mirror, showing Macbeth many more of Banquo's heirs, a bow to the reigning king, who was believed to descend from Banquo.
Q 20The third apparition tells Macbeth he is safe until which forest reaches Dunsinane Hill?
Birnam Wood
Birnam Wood does come to Dunsinane: Malcolm orders every soldier to cut a bough and carry it before him as they march on the castle.
Macbeth's severed head is Macduff's proof as he hails Malcolm king, and Malcolm then makes his thanes the first earls Scotland ever named.
Q 24Which three-word cry from Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking scene has passed into everyday English?
Out, damned spot!
Out, damned spot! she cries, scrubbing at blood no one can see, the woman who once told her husband that 'a little water clears us of this deed'.
Q 25Which attendant tells Macbeth his wife is dead, prompting 'Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow'?
Seyton
Seyton is still at Macbeth's side at the end, and when Macbeth demands his armour too early, Seyton tells him it is 'not needed yet'.
Q 26In the closing speech of Macbeth, Malcolm invites everyone to see him crowned where?
Scone
Scone was where Scottish kings were crowned, and its Stone of Scone was taken to Westminster Abbey in 1296 and returned to Scotland only in 1996.
Q 27Which Faulkner novel takes its title from Macbeth's line about 'a tale told by an idiot'?
The Sound and the Fury
The Sound and the Fury opens with a section narrated by Benjy, an intellectually disabled man, echoing the soliloquy's 'tale told by an idiot'.
Q 28Actors who think it unlucky to say 'Macbeth' inside a theatre call the play what instead?
The Scottish Play
The Scottish Play is said to be cursed; one legend has the boy playing Lady Macbeth dying so Shakespeare took the role, but there is no evidence for it.
Q 29What must an actor who says 'Macbeth' inside a theatre do to lift the curse?
Leave, spin three times and spit
Leave, spin three times and spit is one common version of the ritual, and the offender must then swear and knock to be let back in.
Q 30Lady Macbeth urges her husband to look like the innocent flower but be what under it?
The serpent
The serpent is her advice as Duncan approaches, yet she cannot kill him herself, because asleep he resembled her father.