Shakespeare's Sonnets
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50 free Shakespeare's Sonnets trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Shakespeare's sonnets are some of the most quoted poems in English, and some of the most argued over. Nobody is sure who they were written for, who the people in them were, or whether their author ever meant them to be published. What survives is a run of short poems about love, jealousy, ageing and the hope that verse can outlast all three. This quiz covers the sonnets the way a good class would. There are questions on the lines everyone half remembers, including Sonnet 18 and its famous opening question, Sonnet 116, Sonnet 130 and the less familiar Sonnet 118. There are questions on how a Shakespearean sonnet is built, from its metre and rhyme to the turn near the end, and on the story behind the first printing, the puzzling dedication and the real people scholars have proposed as the poet's friend and mistress. It suits students revising for an English exam, teachers who want a ready-made quiz, book groups and anyone who likes knowing where a familiar phrase comes from. Every answer comes with a short explanation, and the lines quoted are Shakespeare's own.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In Shakespeare's Sonnet 18, the speaker wonders whether to compare the beloved to what, then calls it less lovely?
A summer's day
A summer's day proves too short, too hot and too windy to match the beloved, whose beauty the poem promises to keep alive for as long as people can read.
Q 02Shakespeare's Sonnet 130, which mocks flattering love poems, opens by saying the mistress's eyes are nothing like what?
The sun
The sun is only the first compliment refused: her lips are paler than coral and her breath reeks, yet the speaker ends by calling his love as rare as any woman praised with false comparisons.
Q 03Which metre, also the rhythm of the verse in Shakespeare's plays, is used in all but one of his sonnets?
Iambic pentameter
Iambic pentameter gives each line five beats and roughly ten syllables. The lone exception is Sonnet 145, written in shorter lines of four beats.
Q 04Which Shakespeare play opens with a sonnet spoken by a Chorus and has its lovers share another when they meet?
Romeo and Juliet
Romeo and Juliet share fourteen lines when they first speak, trading metaphors of saints and their devotees.
Q 05Some scholars think Shakespeare's Sonnet 145 puns on the surname of which woman, whom he wed at eighteen?
Anne Hathaway
Anne Hathaway is perhaps hidden in the words 'hate away' near the poem's end, a pun Andrew Gurr proposed in 1971. Other scholars doubt the two sounded alike.
Q 06Which singer named a 1987 album after a line from Shakespeare's Sonnet 130 that he once quoted to a drunk?
Sting
Sting said a drunk asked him how beautiful the moon was, and he answered with the sonnet's opening words. He also worked them into the track Sister Moon.
Q 07A phrase from Shakespeare's Sonnet 30 became the English title of which French novelist's seven-volume masterpiece?
Marcel Proust
Marcel Proust's translator C. K. Scott Moncrieff chose Remembrance of Things Past. A literal title, In Search of Lost Time, took over after a 1992 revision.
Q 08The word sonnet, the name of the fourteen-line form Shakespeare mastered, comes from an Italian word meaning what?
Little song
Little song is the literal sense of the Italian sonetto, and in Shakespeare's lifetime the English word could still mean any short lyric poem.
Q 09The first seventeen of Shakespeare's sonnets urge a handsome young man to do what before his beauty fades?
Have children
Have children, the speaker pleads, so the young man's looks survive in a son. Scholars call these seventeen poems the procreation sonnets.
Q 10Shakespeare's Sonnet 116, on love that never alters, calls love which guide to every wandering bark, or ship?
A star
A star, specifically the fixed North Star that sailors steered by. The same sonnet insists that love endures 'even to the edge of doom'.
Q 11The 1609 quarto that first collected Shakespeare's sonnets, most never before printed, contains how many of them?
154
154 sonnets fill the book, and all but two were new to print: a pair had slipped into an unauthorised anthology about ten years earlier.
Q 12What is the rhyming pair of lines called that ends a Shakespearean sonnet, often with a twist or summary?
A couplet
A couplet gives the form its punch: after twelve lines of alternating rhyme, two lines that rhyme with each other sum up or overturn the argument.
Q 13Before the closing rhymed pair, a Shakespearean sonnet is built from three four-line units known as what?
Quatrains
Quatrains fill twelve of the fourteen lines, and the shift of thought that critics call the turn often arrives at the end of the third.
Q 21In Shakespeare's Sonnet 18, rough winds shake the darling buds of which month, a phrase reused as a novel's title?
May
May gave H. E. Bates the title of his 1958 novel The Darling Buds of May, which ITV adapted for television from 1991.
Q 22In Shakespeare's Sonnet 29, thinking of the beloved lifts the outcast speaker's mood like which bird rising at dawn?
A lark
A lark, which the poem pictures singing hymns at heaven's gate. The sonnet's first line later gave John Herbert's 1967 play its title, Fortune and Men's Eyes.
Q 23Shakespeare's Sonnet 73 pictures old age as late autumn, a dying fire and which time of day?
Twilight
Twilight sits between the bare branches and the embers, so the three images shrink from a year to a single evening to the last minutes of a fire.
Q 14Which rhyme scheme, ending in a matched pair, do nearly all of Shakespeare's sonnets follow?
ABAB CDCD EFEF GG
ABAB CDCD EFEF GG is now called the Shakespearean or English scheme, though poets were using it in England before he was born.
Q 15What Italian term names the turn of thought that often arrives late in one of Shakespeare's sonnets?
Volta
Volta is simply Italian for 'turn'. In Shakespeare it tends to come after line twelve, later than in the Italian form, where it begins at line nine.
Q 16Shakespeare's sonnets broke from the Italian form named after which poet, who wrote hundreds of sonnets to Laura?
Petrarch
Petrarch wrote 317 sonnets charting his lifelong love for Laura, and poets across Europe were still imitating them two centuries later.
Q 17The 1609 edition of Shakespeare's sonnets is dedicated to a mysterious 'only begetter' identified by which initials?
Mr. W.H.
Mr. W.H. has never been firmly identified, and the dedication is signed by the book's publisher instead of by Shakespeare.
Q 18Which nobleman, to whom Shakespeare dedicated Venus and Adonis, is a leading candidate for the sonnets' Fair Youth?
Earl of Southampton
The Earl of Southampton, Henry Wriothesley, was known for his good looks; the chief rival for the role is another young nobleman, the Earl of Pembroke.
Q 19Which Tudor poet, beheaded for treason in 1547, gave the English sonnet the shape Shakespeare later made famous?
Henry Howard
Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, reworked the form his friend Thomas Wyatt had brought into English, and was the last person executed at Henry VIII's insistence.
Q 20Which London publisher entered Shakespeare's sonnets in the Stationers' Register in 1609 and issued the quarto?
Thomas Thorpe
Thomas Thorpe perhaps acted without Shakespeare's approval: nobody knows whether his copy was an authorised manuscript.
Q 24Shakespeare's Sonnet 55 boasts that its rhyme shall outlive the gilded monuments of princes and which stone?
Marble
Marble and masonry fall to war in the sonnet while the verse survives. Horace and Ovid made the same boast, but claimed the immortality for themselves.
Q 25Shakespeare's Sonnet 60, about time's steady march, opens by likening our passing minutes to what?
Waves
Waves rolling towards a pebbled shore, each one replacing the last, set the sonnet's pace. Shakespeare took the image from Ovid's Metamorphoses.
Q 26Shakespeare's Sonnet 94 ends by warning that which flowers, once they fester, smell far worse than weeds?
Lilies
Lilies that fester appear word for word in the anonymously printed play Edward III, part of the case that Shakespeare had a hand in it.
Q 27Shakespeare's Sonnet 71 asks the beloved to mourn the speaker only while which surly, sullen sound can be heard?
A bell
A bell announcing the death sets the limit. The speaker claims he would rather be forgotten than have loving thoughts of him cause any grief.
Q 28Shakespeare's Sonnet 19 opens by daring devouring Time to blunt the paws of which animal?
The lion
The lion heads a list of things Time is free to ruin, with the tiger's teeth and the phoenix. Only one crime is forbidden: carving lines into the young man's brow.
Q 29Shakespeare's Sonnet 129, which opens with 'the expense of spirit in a waste of shame', is a furious attack on what?
Lust
Lust is savage, extreme, rude and cruel before it is satisfied, the sonnet says, and despised the moment afterwards, like bait a fish has swallowed.
Q 30In Shakespeare's Sonnet 147, the speaker's love is like which illness, with reason as the doctor who has walked out?
A fever
A fever that craves whatever feeds it, the sonnet says, though Elizabethan medicine held that such a patient must go hungry; ignored, the doctor leaves in anger.