Richard III
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50 free Richard III trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Shakespeare's Richard III gives the stage one of its great schemers: a duke who tells the audience exactly what he plans to do, then does it, charming and murdering his way to the crown. It is among the most quoted plays in English, and its title role has drawn leading actors ever since it was written. This quiz covers the play from the opening soliloquy to the final battle: the lines everyone half-remembers, who plots with whom, who ends up in the Tower, and how each curse and prophecy comes home. Other questions follow the story off the page, to famous film versions and to the real monarch whose grave was found in the twenty-first century. It suits students revising the plot, characters and quotations, teachers who want a quick check on the reading, and anyone who has seen a production and wants to find out how much of it stuck.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which season 'of our discontent' does Richard declare over in the first line of Richard III?
Winter
Winter has turned to 'glorious summer', he says, by 'this sun of York': a pun on his brother Edward, the Yorkist king. Britain's strike-hit winter of 1978–79 took its nickname from the line.
Q 02What does the unhorsed Richard offer in exchange for a horse at the climax of Richard III?
His kingdom
His kingdom is the price he shouts twice, yet when an aide offers to help him flee he refuses to leave the field. He claims to have already killed five men dressed as his rival.
Q 03Beneath what kind of city-centre site was the real Richard III's skeleton found in 2012?
A car park
A car park had been laid over the vanished friary church where he was buried in 1485. The skeleton turned up on the very first day of the dig.
Q 04Unable to 'prove a lover', what does Richard say he is determined to prove as Richard III opens?
A villain
A villain is a part he chooses out loud, blaming a body 'rudely stamp'd' and unfit for courtship. By confiding in the audience he makes them his accomplices from the first minute.
Q 05In Richard III, hired murderers stab Richard's imprisoned brother and then drown him in what?
A butt of malmsey
A butt of malmsey is a huge cask of sweet wine. Shakespeare did not invent the detail: soon after the real duke's private execution in 1478, a rumour spread that he had been drowned in one.
Q 06Which presidential assassin was a Shakespearean actor known for playing Richard III?
John Wilkes Booth
John Wilkes Booth played both the tyrant and his conqueror Richmond on stage. Abraham Lincoln, the president he shot, was renowned for his love of Shakespeare and of this play in particular.
Q 07In Richard III, the Earl of Richmond kills Richard at Bosworth and takes the throne as which king?
Henry VII
Henry VII, the first Tudor monarch, ends the play by vowing to marry Elizabeth of York and join the two feuding houses. Shakespeare was writing under that couple's granddaughter, Elizabeth I.
Q 08Which actor plays Richard as a 1930s fascist dictator in the 1995 film of Shakespeare's Richard III?
Ian McKellen
Ian McKellen also co-wrote the screenplay, which grew out of a hit stage production. His tyrant shouts the famous plea for a horse from a jeep stuck in rubble.
Q 09Richard III dramatises the final phase of which long conflict over the English crown?
The Wars of the Roses
The Wars of the Roses were known at the time simply as the Civil Wars. The modern name only became common in the 19th century, after an 1829 novel by Sir Walter Scott.
Q 10In Richard III, which widow does Richard woo beside the coffin of the king he murdered?
Lady Anne
Lady Anne spits at him midway through the scene, yet ends it wearing his ring. Left alone, he gloats to the audience that he will have her but will not keep her long.
Q 11In Richard III, a prophecy that 'G' will disinherit the king's heirs sends which duke to the Tower?
Clarence
Clarence is suspected because his first name is George. The real threat is the younger brother who planted the rumour and who now promises, all sympathy, to get him released.
Q 12Which actor directed himself as the scheming king in the 1955 film of Richard III?
Laurence Olivier
Laurence Olivier was Oscar-nominated for the role. A 1956 American TV broadcast drew so many viewers that the British Film Institute said it may have popularised Shakespeare more than any other single work.
Q 13Which widow of a murdered Lancastrian king haunts the court in Richard III, cursing her enemies?
Queen Margaret
Q 21Which spinal condition did the real Richard III's skeleton show, rather than Shakespeare's hunchback?
Scoliosis
Scoliosis bent his spine sideways and probably lifted his right shoulder above his left, but it would not have stopped an active life or produced what doctors call a hunchback.
Q 22The real Richard III was the last king of which dynasty, rulers of England for over three centuries?
Plantagenets
The Plantagenets had ruled England since Henry II came to the throne in 1154. When the line ended at Bosworth, its last monarch also became the last English king to be killed in battle.
Q 23Which animal, Richard's heraldic badge, do his enemies turn into an insult throughout Richard III?
A boar
Queen Margaret has no business being there: the real woman was ransomed back to France in 1475 and spent the rest of her life abroad. Shakespeare returns her to court to voice the play's curses.
Q 14Which duke helps Richard to the crown in Richard III, then balks at murdering the princes?
Buckingham
Buckingham raises a revolt instead, but is captured and executed before the final battle. On the way to the block he recalls a false oath in which he once wished exactly this fate on himself.
Q 15In Richard III, which command do the ghosts of Richard's victims repeat to him before Bosworth?
Despair and die
Despair and die is the refrain as eleven ghosts visit in turn, each then blessing his sleeping rival. He wakes in a sweat, admitting that no creature loves him and no soul will pity his death.
Q 16In which English city was the real Richard III reburied in 2015 after a legal fight?
Leicester
Leicester won because the dig's licence said any remains would be reburied in its cathedral. Campaigners who wanted York Minster instead took the fight to judges and lost.
Q 17Which tragedy is the only Shakespeare play longer than Richard III, his second-longest by word count?
Hamlet
Hamlet is the only one that outruns it. Richard III is so long that productions usually abridge it and drop minor characters altogether.
Q 18Which dukedom does Richard hold for the first three acts of Richard III, before he takes the crown?
Gloucester
Gloucester is what the script calls him until Act 4, when the speech headings switch to King Richard. The real man was given the title in 1461, the year his eldest brother first took the throne.
Q 19Which Hollywood star directed and starred in Looking for Richard, a 1996 documentary on Richard III?
Al Pacino
Al Pacino plays both himself and the king, quizzing scholars, fellow actors and people on the street about why Shakespeare still matters. His first film as director, it won a Directors Guild of America award.
Q 20Which actor played Richard in The Hollow Crown and read a poem at the real king's 2015 reburial?
Benedict Cumberbatch
Benedict Cumberbatch is a distant relative of the king he was about to play. The poem he read at the service was written for the occasion by the then poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy.
A boar, white on his banners, becomes a rooting hog and a foul swine in his enemies' mouths. His conqueror rallies the troops by picturing the beast swilling their blood like wash.
Q 24In Richard III, how do the hired killers say they murdered the two young princes in the Tower?
Smothered in bed
Smothered in bed is all the audience ever learns, because the killing happens offstage and is only reported. The two hardened thugs who did it are said to have wept like children in the telling.
Q 25In Richard III, what does Richard ask the Bishop of Ely to fetch from his garden mid-council?
Strawberries
Strawberries make the future king look relaxed and friendly. Minutes after the errand he returns in a rage, and one councillor is condemned to lose his head before dinner.
Q 26Which lord in Richard III laughs off a friend's ominous dream and is beheaded hours later?
Hastings
Hastings is so sure of his standing that he gloats over his enemies' executions that very morning. Too late he recalls that his horse stumbled three times on the way to the Tower.
Q 27Before Bosworth in Richard III, what does Richard call 'but a word that cowards use'?
Conscience
Conscience had him in a cold sweat hours earlier, when he woke from his nightmare calling it a coward that afflicted him. Now he tells his men that force is the only law.
Q 28In Richard III, the scripture-quoting Richard boasts he seems what 'when most I play the devil'?
A saint
A saint is the mask, stitched from what he calls old odd ends stolen out of holy writ. The masked avenger of V for Vendetta quotes the same speech while confronting a clergyman.
Q 29Which part of his body does Richard display in Richard III as proof he has been bewitched?
His arm
His arm, he says, has withered like a blasted sapling, and he blames the widowed queen and Mistress Shore. The charge is a trap: a lord who begins his reply with 'If' is sentenced to death on the spot.
Q 30Which statesman, later beheaded by Henry VIII, wrote the hostile history behind Richard III?
Thomas More
Thomas More never finished it. As a boy he was a page in the household of John Morton, who had joined a rebellion against the king and probably shaped his hostile view.