Q 01/05

Shakespeare's home town, Stratford, stands on which river?

A) Thames

B) Severn

C) Avon

D) Trent

Answer · why

C) Avon

The Avon gives Stratford-upon-Avon its name, and he never cut his ties to it: his family lived on in the town while he worked in London, he bought one...

Q 02/05

What was the name of Shakespeare's only son, who died aged 11 in 1596?

A) Hamnet

B) Edmund

C) Gilbert

D) Richard

Answer · why

A) Hamnet

Hamnet was probably named after a Stratford neighbour, the baker Hamnet Sadler; a few years after burying him, his father wrote a tragedy whose title ...

Q 03/05

What did Shakespeare pointedly leave his wife in his will?

A) His second-best bed

B) His Stratford house

C) His share in the Globe

D) His books and papers

Answer · why

A) His second-best bed

His second-best bed 'with the furniture' is nearly all the will says of his wife, in a line squeezed in between others; scholars still argue whether i...

Q 04/05

How many children did William Shakespeare have?

A) Two

B) Three

C) Four

D) Five

Answer · why

B) Three

Three: Susanna, born 1583, and the twins Hamnet and Judith, born 1585. Only the daughters reached adulthood, and the line ended when Susanna's daughte...

Q 05/05

Which two monarch-named eras of England’s history did Shakespeare write across?

A) Henrician and Marian

B) Victorian and Edwardian

C) Georgian and Regency

D) Elizabethan and Jacobean

Answer · why

D) Elizabethan and Jacobean

Elizabethan and Jacobean: he began writing under Elizabeth I by 1592 and continued into the reign of James I, who made his company the King's Men in 1...