SHAKESPEARE IN JAPAN
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SHAKESPEARE QUIZZES
The following are quizzes I use for undergraduate lecture courses on Shakespeare and the history of English literature. Students mark the statements as either True (T) or False (F).
Quiz One
(classical heritage through to Milton)
1. Shakespeare adhered strictly to the rules of classical drama.
2. The legend of Philomela laments violence committed against women.
3. According to Cicero, comedy is about funny things that happen to great people.
4. Shakespeare shares with Chaucer a skill at tragicomedy.
5. The mystery plays were based on popular stories from the Bible.
6. The Elizabethans regarded fine rhetoric as essential to maintaining social order.
7. Shakespeare’s ideas come partly from the Renaissance humanist Michel de Montaigne.
8. The Globe was the first of the Elizabethan theatres.
9. Marlowe’s ambition was to conquer the stage with his thrilling rhetoric.
10. The central character of Dr Faustus
sells his soul to the devil.
11. Most of Shakespeare’s plots were invented by the playwright himself.
12. Hamlet
is a revenge tragedy.
13. Jaques dresses as a woman in As You Like It.
14. Shakespeare is a writer who typically presents more than one point of view.
15. Ben Jonson is famous for his four great tragedies.
16. The Jacobean age lasted from 1603 to 1642.
17. Milton’s Paradise Lost
rhymes.
Quiz Two
(18th and 19th centuries)
1. The Puritans believed that the theatre was good for one’s health.
2. The Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, was built soon after the Great Fire of London.
3. Pope was generally critical of the new mercantile culture.
4. Dr Johnson is famous for his English dictionary, but never edited Shakespeare.
5. For the neo-classicists, Shakespeare’s problem was that he broke the rules of correct writing.
6. The exercise of reason was most important to Enlightenment thinkers.
7. For a Romantic like Blake, Shakespeare was a poet of contradiction.
8. Wordsworth wrote in a similar poetic meter to Shakespeare’s.
9. Wordsworth criticized Shakespeare for his childishness.
10. What Coleridge admired most of all about Shakespeare was his powerful imagination.
11. Hazlitt admired Shakespeare’s sympathy for the human condition.
12. Jane Austen’s novels are mainly about young ladies looking for suitable husbands.
13. Austen and Shakespeare are both skilled ironists.
14. The American actor Edwin Booth was murdered by his brother in 1865.
15. Sir Henry Irving was a less stylized actor than his Romantic predecessors.
16. Charles Dickens’ view of human character was profoundly influenced by Shakespeare.
17. The Victorians regarded ‘bardolatry’ as a sin.