Shakespeare Trivia

Four centuries after his death, the man from Stratford still dominates the English language. Somewhere around 1,700 words made their first recorded appearance in his work — "eyeball," "swagger," "lonely," "bedazzled," and "gossip" among them. Every time someone breaks the ice, refuses to budge an inch, or waits with bated breath, they're quoting him without knowing it.

Shakespeare wrote roughly 37 plays and 154 sonnets, yet the biographical record is famously thin. There are stretches of his life — the so-called "lost years" — where historians simply have no idea what he was doing. That vacuum has fueled centuries of wild theories, including the persistent claim that someone else wrote the plays entirely.

Here's a stranger truth: he barely seemed to care whether his work survived. Nearly half his plays were never printed in his lifetime. Had two of his fellow actors not gathered the scripts into a single volume seven years after his death, titles like Macbeth and The Tempest might have vanished forever.

And his reach is genuinely global. His plays have been translated into more than 100 languages, staged in Klingon, adapted into Japanese samurai epics, reimagined as high school comedies, and performed continuously somewhere on Earth for over 400 years. Not bad for a glover's son with no university degree.

What makes his catalogue so quiz-worthy is its sheer range. There are the crowd-pleasers everyone half-remembers from school — the doomed lovers, the indecisive prince, the scheming villains. Then there are the shadowy corners: the problem plays, the collaborations, the obscure clowns and their even more obscure dogs. How many people can name the melancholy lord behind one of the most quoted speeches ever written? Or the island servant twisted by resentment toward his master?

This quiz roams across the whole territory — tragedies, comedies, histories, and the odd romance that refuses to sit neatly in any category. Some questions reward a casual playgoer. Others demand the kind of knowledge usually reserved for people who own more than one annotated edition.

Poison, prophecy, mistaken identity, and at least one memorably fatal bear await. Time to find out how deep the knowledge really runs. Take the quiz and see.