70 free Macbeth trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 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.
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Q 01Macbeth is only slightly more than half the length of which other Shakespeare tragedy?
Hamlet
It is Shakespeare's shortest tragedy, more than a thousand lines shorter than Othello and King Lear, which is one reason scholars suspect the surviving text was cut for performance.
Q 02The play survives in only one early printed source. What is it?
The First Folio of 1623
No quarto edition exists, so every modern edition descends from that single Folio text.
Q 03In roughly which year is Macbeth thought to have been first performed?
1606
Most scholars tie it to the aftermath of a notorious Catholic conspiracy against the king, and the Porter's jokes about an 'equivocator' fit topical events of that year.
Q 04Shakespeare's main source for the story was which 1587 chronicle history of Britain?
Holinshed's Chronicles
The same book supplied the plots for King Lear, Cymbeline and most of the English history plays.
Q 05Which astrologer wrote the earliest surviving eyewitness account of a Globe performance, in 1610?
Simon Forman
His diary of plays seen is one of the very few first-hand records of Shakespeare's theatre in action, though oddly it never mentions the cauldron scene.
Q 06Which monarch, patron of Shakespeare's company, wrote a treatise on witchcraft called Daemonologie?
James I
He believed he had personally been the target of a witches' murder plot, which helps explain why the play flatters his interest in the supernatural.
Q 07Macbeth's Porter welcoming an 'equivocator' is read as alluding to Jesuit Henry Garnet's trial after which event?
The Gunpowder Plot
Garnet used the alias 'Farmer', and the Porter also welcomes a farmer to hell, which is why scholars date the scene to the year of his execution.
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 09Banquo, the Weird Sisters and Lady Macbeth were first mentioned in 1527 by which Scottish historian?
Hector Boece
He wanted to blacken the real Macbeth's name to strengthen the House of Stuart's claim, and Shakespeare inherited the invention second-hand.
Q 10At the start of the play, Macbeth already holds the title Thane of which place?
Glamis
The witches greet him with that title first, then with a title he does not yet know he has been given, then as king hereafter.
Q 11After its treacherous holder is executed, King Duncan gives Macbeth which title?
Thane of Cawdor
The news arrives moments after the witches predicted it, which is what convinces Macbeth their third prophecy might come true too.
Q 12The rebellion Macbeth and Banquo crush at the play's opening is allied with invaders from which kingdom?
Norway
The Norwegian king ends up paying ten thousand dollars for the right to bury his dead, one of the play's stranger anachronisms.
Q 13Duncan spends his fatal night as a guest at Macbeth's castle in which town?
Inverness
No earlier version of the story had the king murdered under Macbeth's own roof; Shakespeare imported that detail from a different chronicle killing to make the crime a violation of hospitality.
Q 21Macduff holds which Scottish title?
Thane of Fife
The historical Clan MacDuff really were the most powerful family in that region during the Middle Ages.
Q 22Macduff can kill Macbeth despite the prophecy that no man 'of woman born' will harm him. Why?
He was delivered by Caesarean section
He was 'from his mother's womb untimely ripped', which the witches' wording technically excludes.
Q 23What does Macduff carry on stage to Malcolm in the final scene?
Macbeth's severed head
He hails Malcolm as king with the trophy in hand, and Malcolm's closing speech promotes the thanes to earls.
Q 14Duncan names his son Malcolm heir to the throne by giving him what title?
Prince of Cumberland
The announcement blocks Macbeth's hope of inheriting peacefully and is the moment he starts contemplating murder.
Q 15Whom does Macbeth kill right after Duncan's body is found, before they can protest innocence?
The king's servants
Lady Macbeth had smeared them with blood and planted the daggers, so silencing them completed the frame-up.
Q 16Malcolm flees to England after his father's murder. Where does his brother Donalbain go?
Ireland
Splitting up, Donalbain says, keeps them both safer where 'there's daggers in men's smiles'.
Q 17What is the name of Banquo's son, who escapes the ambush that kills his father?
Fleance
His escape is what leaves the witches' promise that Banquo will father kings alive, and Macbeth knows it.
Q 18Banquo's ghost appears to Macbeth during which occasion?
A royal banquet
The stage direction has the ghost sit in Macbeth's own chair, and only Macbeth can see it, so the guests watch their king rave at an empty seat.
Q 19In the witches' final vision, how many crowned kings descended from Banquo pass before Macbeth?
Eight
The last carries a mirror showing many more, a compliment to the reigning king who counted Banquo as an ancestor.
Q 20The third apparition tells Macbeth he is safe until which forest reaches Dunsinane Hill?
Birnam Wood
Malcolm's soldiers later cut branches to hide their numbers, so the wood does, in a sense, walk.
Q 24Which three-word cry from Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking scene has passed into everyday English?
Out, damned spot!
A doctor and a gentlewoman watch her try to wash imaginary blood off her hands, the guilt she had mocked her husband for feeling.
Q 25Which attendant tells Macbeth his wife is dead, prompting 'Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow'?
Seyton
His name is often heard on stage as 'Satan', an echo many directors lean into as Macbeth's last loyal servant.
Q 26Macbeth's Malcolm invites everyone to see him crowned at which traditional site of Scottish coronations?
Scone
The Stone of Scone was carried off to Westminster Abbey by Edward I in 1296 and only returned to Scotland 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
Faulkner's working title had been Twilight; the final one comes from the same soliloquy that gives us 'brief candle'.
Q 28Actors who consider it unlucky to say the name inside a theatre call it what instead?
The Scottish Play
Patrick Stewart has claimed an exemption: anyone who has actually played the role is allowed to say it anywhere.
Q 29One cure for saying the name in a theatre is reciting a line from which lucky Shakespeare play?
The Merchant of Venice
Other remedies include leaving the building, spinning three times, spitting over the left shoulder and swearing before being invited back in.
Q 30Which star's tights caught fire in a 1953 Bermuda production often cited as proof of the curse?
Charlton Heston
Burgess Meredith directed the show, which was plagued by mishaps from start to finish.