Q 01/05

Macbeth is only slightly more than half the length of which other Shakespeare tragedy?

A) Hamlet

B) King Lear

C) Othello

D) Julius Caesar

Answer · why

A) 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 survivin...

Q 02/05

The play survives in only one early printed source. What is it?

A) A 1608 quarto

B) The First Folio of 1623

C) A 1611 prompt book

D) The Second Folio of 1632

Answer · why

B) The First Folio of 1623

No quarto edition exists, so every modern edition descends from that single Folio text.

Q 03/05

In roughly which year is Macbeth thought to have been first performed?

A) 1594

B) 1599

C) 1606

D) 1612

Answer · why

C) 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 e...

Q 04/05

Shakespeare's main source for the story was which 1587 chronicle history of Britain?

A) Camden's Britannia

B) Bede's Ecclesiastical History

C) Holinshed's Chronicles

D) Foxe's Book of Martyrs

Answer · why

C) Holinshed's Chronicles

The same book supplied the plots for King Lear, Cymbeline and most of the English history plays.

Q 05/05

Which astrologer wrote the earliest surviving eyewitness account of a Globe performance, in 1610?

A) John Dee

B) Robert Fludd

C) William Lilly

D) Simon Forman

Answer · why

D) 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 scen...