Percy Bysshe Shelley Trivia
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50 free Percy Bysshe Shelley trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Percy Bysshe Shelley trivia quiz covers the poet whose life was as turbulent as his verse. The easy questions are the ones every English student meets: his birth year, the wife who wrote Frankenstein, the sonnet about a ruined statue, the elegy for Keats, and the boat that went down off the Italian coast. From there it moves into the expulsion from Oxford over an atheist pamphlet, the two elopements with sixteen-year-olds, the summer with Byron on Lake Geneva, and the years of exile in Italy. The harder end is for readers who know the poems: the pen name he used for Ozymandias, the friend he wrote it against, the verse form of Ode to the West Wind, the number of Spenserian stanzas in Adonais, the fairy of Queen Mab, the character who topples Jupiter in Prometheus Unbound, and the political line from The Mask of Anarchy that protesters still chant. There are also questions on his vegetarianism, his heart that would not burn, and the newspaper that gloated over his death. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries on Shelley and his major works before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, try our Mary Shelley, Lord Byron and John Keats quizzes next.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Shelley was born at Field Place near Horsham in which English county?
Sussex
Sussex. He grew up heir to the family estates and, from 1806, a baronetcy, but his father outlived him by more than twenty years, so he never inherited either.
Q 02Shelley drowned after welcoming which friend?
Leigh Hunt
Leigh Hunt. He had come out with his family to edit The Liberal, a journal Shelley had planned with Byron, and Shelley was lost in a storm on the voyage back from greeting him.
Q 03Shelley's second wife wrote which famous novel?
Frankenstein
Frankenstein. Mary Shelley began it at 18, when Byron challenged his house guests to write a ghost story each during a summer of incessant rain.
Q 04Shelley wrote Ozymandias in a friendly sonnet contest with which friend, a stockbroker and poet?
Horace Smith
Horace Smith. His rival sonnet ran in The Examiner three weeks after Shelley's and ends with a hunter of the future puzzling over the ruins of a vanished London.
Q 05Ozymandias is the Greek name for which Egyptian pharaoh?
Ramesses II
Ramesses II. The Greeks turned his throne name, Usermaatre, into Ozymandias; far from vanishing, he reigned 66 years and left Egypt temples such as Abu Simbel.
Q 06Which bird does Shelley greet with the words 'Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!'?
A skylark
A skylark. Shelley and Mary heard one carolling on a summer evening walk in the lanes near Livorno in 1820; his poem then tells it 'Bird thou never wert'.
Q 07Which title does Shelley's Ozymandias claim on his pedestal?
King of Kings
King of Kings. Shelley took the boast from the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, whose version dares any rival to surpass the king's works; the poem turns that dare into despair.
Q 08The colossal head said to have inspired Ozymandias, the Younger Memnon, is displayed in which museum?
The British Museum
The British Museum. Giovanni Belzoni, a former circus strongman, got the seven-ton bust to the Nile in 1816 by having a large gang of workmen drag it on wooden rollers.
Q 09From which university was Shelley expelled in 1811?
Oxford
Oxford. University College expelled him after less than a year for refusing to say whether he had written an anonymous pamphlet, and his refusal to back down afterwards cost him his father's support.
Q 10What was the title of the pamphlet that got Shelley expelled?
The Necessity of Atheism
The Necessity of Atheism. Shelley posted the anonymous pamphlet to bishops and college heads, a move that looked designed to provoke them, and it did.
Q 11Which university friend was expelled alongside Shelley in 1811?
Thomas Jefferson Hogg
Thomas Jefferson Hogg. Within months, by her account, he tried to seduce Shelley's young wife while the poet was away, yet Shelley forgave him and the friendship lasted for life.
Q 12At which school did Shelley spend six years from the age of 12, often bullied?
Eton
Eton. His forbidden science experiments there once gave his tutor a severe electric shock from a charged Leyden jar.
Q 13What nickname did Shelley's schoolmates give him?
Mad Shelley
Mad Shelley. His violent rages under provocation earned it; biographers put the bullying itself down in part to his refusal to fag, the custom that made younger boys the servants of older ones.
Q 21Beside which lake did Shelley and Byron spend the famous summer of 1816?
Geneva
Lake Geneva. On a boat tour that June a storm nearly sank the two poets; Shelley, who could not swim, sat with his arms crossed, dreading only that Byron would risk his life to save him.
Q 22What was Byron reciting when Shelley suffered a panic attack with hallucinations at Villa Diodati?
Christabel
Christabel. As Byron reached Coleridge's lines on the lady's breast, Shelley shrieked and ran from the room; he said he had pictured a woman with eyes where her nipples should be.
Q 23Which mountain gave its name to a Shelley poem written in the Alps in 1816?
Mont Blanc
Mont Blanc. Shelley wrote that its summits filled him with a wonder 'not unallied to madness', and he and Mary made the poem the closing piece of the travel book they published in 1817.
Q 14What was the name of Shelley's first wife, whom he eloped with to Scotland in 1811?
Harriet Westbrook
Harriet Westbrook. A schoolfriend of his sisters, she was 16, and Shelley saw the elopement as rescuing her from her school; his father answered by cutting off his allowance.
Q 15Rather than Gretna Green, which Scottish city did Shelley and his 16-year-old bride elope to in 1811?
Edinburgh
Edinburgh. They married there in August 1811 and went through a second ceremony in London in March 1814, only months before Shelley left her for Mary Godwin.
Q 16Shelley's father sat in Parliament for which party?
Whig
Whig. Sir Timothy sat for Shoreham as a follower of the Duke of Norfolk, the magnate who later worked to reconcile father and son and helped get the poet's allowance restored.
Q 17Who was the mother of Shelley's second wife?
Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft. The author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman died days after giving birth to her, and within months Godwin published a memoir that told the world of her love affairs.
Q 18Where did Shelley and Mary Godwin declare their love for each other in June 1814?
At her mother's grave
At her mother's grave. St Pancras churchyard was where the pair met in secret, and when Godwin learned of the affair he banned Shelley from his house; within weeks they had eloped.
Q 19Which stepsister of Mary Godwin joined her and Shelley when they eloped to Europe in 1814?
Claire Clairmont
Claire Clairmont. Two years later she began an affair with Byron, and it was her pursuit of him that first brought the two poets together.
Q 20Shelley's radical mentor, whose daughter he ran off with, wrote which work?
Political Justice
Political Justice. William Godwin's book attacked marriage as an institution, yet he refused to see Shelley and Mary until they wed, while still pressing Shelley for money.
Q 24How did Shelley's first wife die in 1816?
She drowned herself
She drowned herself in the Serpentine, the lake in Hyde Park. Within three weeks of her body being found Shelley had married Mary Godwin, and a long legal fight over his two children followed.
Q 25Which legal body denied Shelley custody of his children by his first wife?
Court of Chancery
Court of Chancery. Lord Eldon ruled that Shelley's principles, and his conduct in acting on them, made him unfit, so the two children were placed with a guardian at his expense.
Q 26What was Shelley's 1813 utopian poem, later a 'bible' for the Chartists?
Queen Mab
Queen Mab. Its attacks on monarchy, marriage and the church were later quoted in a custody case as proof that Shelley was unfit to raise his own children.
Q 27Fearing prosecution, what did Shelley do with his 1813 poem's first edition?
Gave copies away
Gave copies away. Only 250 were printed, and when a pirate bookseller put the poem on public sale in 1821, Shelley wrote to a newspaper disowning it.
Q 28Which TV drama titled a 2013 episode Ozymandias and had its star recite Shelley's sonnet in a trailer?
Breaking Bad
Breaking Bad. Bryan Cranston read the whole sonnet over shots of the New Mexico desert, and the episode named for it shows Walter White's drug empire collapsing around him.
Q 29Which event prompted Shelley to write The Mask of Anarchy?
The Peterloo Massacre
The Peterloo Massacre. In 1819 cavalry rode into a peaceful Manchester crowd of some 60,000 who had gathered to demand the vote; the news reached Shelley in Italy, and he answered with this poem.
Q 30Shelley's Mask of Anarchy finally appeared in the year of which law?
Great Reform Act
Great Reform Act. The editor Shelley sent his protest poem to in 1819 sat on it, and it came out in 1832, with that editor's preface, only as Parliament began to widen the vote.