Poetry & Plays Quiz

Question 1

How many lines does a sonnet traditionally have?

Accepted Answer

14

Answer

10

Answer

12

Answer

16

Question 2

Which Shakespeare play features the witches who say 'Double, double toil and trouble'?

Accepted Answer

Macbeth

Answer

Hamlet

Answer

King Lear

Answer

Othello

Question 3

Which ancient Greek playwright wrote 'Oedipus Rex'?

Accepted Answer

Sophocles

Answer

Aeschylus

Answer

Aristophanes

Answer

Euripides

Question 4

What is a 'haiku'?

Accepted Answer

A Japanese three-line poem with a 5-7-5 syllable structure

Answer

A Chinese four-line poem about nature

Answer

A Korean rhyming couplet

Answer

A Japanese ten-line poem

Question 5

Which poet wrote 'The Raven' and 'Annabel Lee'?

Accepted Answer

Edgar Allan Poe

Answer

Walt Whitman

Answer

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Answer

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Question 6

What is the term for a speech delivered by an actor alone on stage, revealing their thoughts?

Accepted Answer

Soliloquy

Answer

Monologue

Answer

Aside

Answer

Prologue

Question 7

Which Romantic poet wrote 'Ode to a Nightingale' and 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'?

Accepted Answer

John Keats

Answer

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Answer

Lord Byron

Answer

William Wordsworth

Question 8

What is 'iambic pentameter'?

Accepted Answer

A line of poetry with five feet, each with an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one

Answer

A type of rhyming couplet

Answer

A 14-line poem structure

Answer

A French form of verse

Question 9

Which Norwegian playwright wrote 'A Doll's House' and 'Hedda Gabler'?

Accepted Answer

Henrik Ibsen

Answer

August Strindberg

Answer

Anton Chekhov

Answer

Bertolt Brecht

Question 10

Which poem begins: 'I wandered lonely as a cloud / That floats on high o'er vales and hills'?

Accepted Answer

Daffodils – Wordsworth

Answer

Ode to Autumn – Keats

Answer

The Prelude – Wordsworth

Answer

Tintern Abbey – Wordsworth

Question 11

What is 'free verse'?

Accepted Answer

Poetry with neither rhyme nor regular metre

Answer

Poetry that rhymes without a fixed metre

Answer

Verse that is freely distributed

Answer

A type of dramatic monologue

Question 12

Which Irish playwright wrote 'Waiting for Godot'?

Accepted Answer

Samuel Beckett

Answer

Oscar Wilde

Answer

George Bernard Shaw

Answer

Sean O'Casey

Question 13

What is a 'couplet' in poetry?

Accepted Answer

Two consecutive lines of poetry that rhyme

Answer

A poem with exactly two stanzas

Answer

A poem with two themes

Answer

A pair of poems on the same subject

Question 14

Which ancient Greek playwright is known for comedies like 'Lysistrata' and 'The Clouds'?

Accepted Answer

Aristophanes

Answer

Sophocles

Answer

Euripides

Answer

Aeschylus

Question 15

Which poet wrote 'The Tyger' and 'Jerusalem'?

Accepted Answer

William Blake

Answer

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Answer

William Wordsworth

Answer

Robert Burns

Question 16

In which Shakespeare comedy do characters include Oberon, Titania, and Puck?

Accepted Answer

A Midsummer Night's Dream

Answer

The Tempest

Answer

Twelfth Night

Answer

As You Like It

Question 17

What is the 'volta' in a sonnet?

Accepted Answer

A shift in thought or argument, usually at the 9th line

Answer

The final couplet

Answer

The opening quatrain

Answer

The rhyme scheme

Question 18

Which American playwright wrote 'Death of a Salesman'?

Accepted Answer

Arthur Miller

Answer

Tennessee Williams

Answer

Eugene O'Neill

Answer

Edward Albee

Question 19

What is 'alliteration' in poetry?

Accepted Answer

The repetition of an initial consonant sound in nearby words

Answer

The repetition of the same end rhyme

Answer

A comparison using 'like' or 'as'

Answer

The use of a word that imitates a sound

Question 20

Which Chilean poet, known for love poetry, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971?

Accepted Answer

Pablo Neruda

Answer

Octavio Paz

Answer

Jorge Luis Borges

Answer

César Vallejo