The Tempest Trivia
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100 free The Tempest trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Tempest trivia quiz covers Shakespeare's late romance from the opening storm to the epilogue in which Prospero asks the audience to free him with applause. The easy questions handle the plot: who usurped whom, which spirit raises the storm, whose son falls for Miranda, and what the drunken butler and jester get up to with Caliban. From there it moves into the play's sources, from the 1609 wreck of the Sea Venture on Bermuda to Montaigne's cannibals and Ovid's Medea. The harder end is for English students and theatre lovers: which scrivener prepared the First Folio text, why 'wise' might really be 'wife', the Restoration adaptation that gave Miranda a sister, the 1838 production that finally restored Shakespeare's words, the moons of Uranus that borrow the play's names, and the science-fiction film that moved the story to Altair IV. There are also questions on Aimé Césaire, Margaret Atwood, W. H. Auden, Robert Browning, John Gielgud and Julie Taymor's gender-swapped Prospera. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries for the play, its characters, sources and adaptations before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, our Shakespeare, Hamlet and English literature quizzes are natural next stops.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Prospero, the magician at the centre of The Tempest, was formerly the duke of which city?
Milan
Milan. He lost it through his own neglect: wrapped up in his books, he handed the running of the state to his brother, who decided to keep it.
Q 02Who is Prospero's treacherous brother in The Tempest?
Antonio
Antonio. He never says sorry: Prospero forgives him aloud in the last scene and Antonio makes no reply, saving his only remaining line for a joke about Caliban.
Q 03In The Tempest, Alonso, who helped depose Prospero, is king of which realm?
Naples
Naples. The play ends by tying the old enemies together: Alonso's son is to marry Prospero's daughter, so the exiled duke's grandchildren will inherit this crown.
Q 04According to Prospero in The Tempest, 'we are such stuff as' what 'are made on'?
Dreams
Dreams. Prospero says it moments after halting the wedding masque in alarm, having just remembered that Caliban and his drunken allies are on their way to kill him.
Q 05Which witch, banished from Algiers, ruled the island and enslaved Ariel before Prospero arrived in The Tempest?
Sycorax
Sycorax. She never appears on stage: she died before Prospero landed, and it is her son Caliban who insists the island is his by inheritance from her.
Q 06In The Tempest, what was Ariel trapped inside for twelve years?
A pine
A pine. Prospero treats the rescue as a debt to collect: when Ariel asks for his freedom, he threatens to peg him inside an oak for twelve more winters.
Q 07What is the name of Prospero's daughter in The Tempest?
Miranda
Miranda. She was not yet three when they were cast adrift, so the first young man she meets at fifteen is only the third man she can remember ever seeing.
Q 08Which shipwrecked prince falls in love with Prospero's daughter in The Tempest?
Ferdinand
Ferdinand. Prospero wants the match but fakes hostility, calling the prince a spy and setting him to haul logs, for fear that a prize won too easily would be valued too lightly.
Q 09Which two comic characters join Caliban in a failed 'rebellion' against Prospero?
Trinculo and Stephano
Trinculo and Stephano. A jester and a drunken butler: Caliban takes Stephano for a god once he has tasted his wine, and all three end up hunted by spirits in the shape of hounds.
Q 10In The Tempest, which old counsellor stocked the exiled Prospero's boat with food, clothes and his beloved books?
Gonzalo
Gonzalo. He was the man put in charge of casting the duke adrift, yet twelve years later Prospero still greets him as 'my true preserver'.
Q 11Which three goddesses appear in the Act IV betrothal masque of The Tempest?
Juno, Ceres and Iris
Juno, Ceres and Iris. Venus and Cupid are pointedly kept away, because the show is a lesson for the young couple in waiting until the wedding night.
Q 12In the epilogue of The Tempest, Prospero asks the audience to set him free with what?
Their applause
Their applause. 'Release me from my bands with the help of your good hands,' he says: his magic is gone, and it is now for the audience to let him leave the island.
Q 13In The Tempest, Ariel takes the shape of which monster to make a banquet vanish?
Harpy
Q 21In The Tempest, Caliban says his only profit from being taught language is that he knows how to do what?
Curse
Curse. Things began kindly: Prospero taught him words and Caliban showed him the island's springs, until an attack on Prospero's daughter ended with Caliban enslaved.
Q 22Editors of The Tempest disagree over whether one line reads 'so rare a wondered father and a wise' or which other word?
Wife
Wife. In 1623 type a long 's' and an 'f' differ only by a tiny crossbar, so the page can be read either way: the Folger edition prints 'wise' where others print 'wife'.
Q 23In which category does the 1623 collected edition list The Tempest, despite its tragic themes?
Comedies
Comedies. The 1623 volume has only three sections, comedies, histories and tragedies; the label 'romance' for this play and three others was coined by a critic in the 1870s.
Harpy. Ariel calls the king and his two companions 'three men of sin' and tells them the storm was payback for casting Prospero and his child out to sea.
Q 14Which playwright collaborated with Shakespeare on Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen after The Tempest?
John Fletcher
John Fletcher. He went on to take Shakespeare's place as the King's Men's house playwright, and the third play the two wrote together, Cardenio, has been lost.
Q 15The wreck of which ship on Bermuda in 1609 is widely thought to have inspired the opening of The Tempest?
Sea Venture
Sea Venture. Survivors' reports reached England the following year, among them an eyewitness letter by William Strachey that Shakespeare is thought to have read before it was printed.
Q 16The 1609 Bermuda shipwreck behind The Tempest happened on a supply mission to which struggling colony?
Jamestown
Jamestown. All 150 aboard got ashore alive, and after some nine months on Bermuda they finished the voyage in two small ships they had built on the island.
Q 17In The Tempest, Prospero's speech renouncing magic borrows from which sorceress's invocation in Ovid's Metamorphoses?
Medea
Medea. Shakespeare follows Arthur Golding's English Ovid closely, with one telling difference: the witch is boasting of her powers, while Prospero uses her words to give his up.
Q 18The old counsellor's dream of an ideal commonwealth in The Tempest borrows from which French writer, in Florio's 1603 translation?
Montaigne
Montaigne. He had praised a people of the Americas with no trade, no letters and no magistrates, and the old lord repeats the list almost item by item while the courtiers jeer.
Q 19Which book contains the earliest printed text of The Tempest?
The First Folio
The First Folio. The Tempest had never been printed before, so without this book it might have been lost, and it is the play that opens the volume.
Q 20Which two colleagues of Shakespeare gathered and edited the plays for the 1623 collected edition?
John Heminges and Henry Condell
John Heminges and Henry Condell. They were fellow actors in his company, and Shakespeare's will left each of them money to buy a mourning ring.
Q 24The Tempest was acted at court in 1612–13 to celebrate what?
A royal wedding
A royal wedding. The king's daughter Elizabeth was marrying a German prince, the Elector Palatine, and this play, with its betrothal masque, was among those staged for the festivities.
Q 25Stage directions suggest The Tempest was written with which indoor theatre in mind rather than an open-air playhouse?
Blackfriars
Blackfriars. The King's Men had recently taken over the hall, a small candlelit room far more intimate than an open-air stage, a good fit for a play so full of songs and spirit music.
Q 26Which poet co-wrote the 1667 Tempest that gave Prospero's daughter a sister?
John Dryden
John Dryden. He and William Davenant added a sister, Dorinda, and a young man who has never seen a woman for her to fall for; their love story stayed in stage versions into the 19th century.
Q 27Whose 1838 production of The Tempest finally restored Shakespeare's own text over the adapted versions?
William Charles Macready
William Charles Macready. Until then audiences had mostly seen a Restoration rewrite with extra lovers and operatic spectacle, which had filled theatres for about 150 years.
Q 28Which actor played Prospero on film at 87 in Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books?
John Gielgud
John Gielgud. He voices the other characters too, because the film imagines Prospero as the author, speaking every line aloud as he writes the play.
Q 29Which 1956 sci-fi film transplanted The Tempest to Altair IV?
Forbidden Planet
Forbidden Planet. Its Caliban is an invisible 'monster from the id', unknowingly conjured from the mind of the Prospero figure himself.
Q 30In the 1956 science-fiction film based on The Tempest, which famous screen robot stands in for Ariel?
Robby
Robby. Built by the film's Prospero figure as a servant, he proved so popular that he went on appearing in other films and television shows long afterwards.