Poetry & Plays Quiz

1. How many lines does a sonnet traditionally have?

1. 10
2. 12
3. 14
4. 16

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

1. Hamlet
2. King Lear
3. Macbeth
4. Othello

3. Which ancient Greek playwright wrote 'Oedipus Rex'?

1. Aeschylus
2. Aristophanes
3. Euripides
4. Sophocles

4. What is a 'haiku'?

1. A Chinese four-line poem about nature
2. A Japanese ten-line poem
3. A Japanese three-line poem with a 5-7-5 syllable structure
4. A Korean rhyming couplet

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

1. Edgar Allan Poe
2. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
3. Ralph Waldo Emerson
4. Walt Whitman

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

1. Aside
2. Monologue
3. Prologue
4. Soliloquy

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

1. John Keats
2. Lord Byron
3. Percy Bysshe Shelley
4. William Wordsworth

8. What is 'iambic pentameter'?

1. A 14-line poem structure
2. A French form of verse
3. A line of poetry with five feet, each with an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one
4. A type of rhyming couplet

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

1. Anton Chekhov
2. August Strindberg
3. Bertolt Brecht
4. Henrik Ibsen

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

1. Daffodils – Wordsworth
2. Ode to Autumn – Keats
3. The Prelude – Wordsworth
4. Tintern Abbey – Wordsworth

11. What is 'free verse'?

1. A type of dramatic monologue
2. Poetry that rhymes without a fixed metre
3. Poetry with neither rhyme nor regular metre
4. Verse that is freely distributed

12. Which Irish playwright wrote 'Waiting for Godot'?

1. George Bernard Shaw
2. Oscar Wilde
3. Samuel Beckett
4. Sean O'Casey

13. What is a 'couplet' in poetry?

1. A pair of poems on the same subject
2. A poem with exactly two stanzas
3. A poem with two themes
4. Two consecutive lines of poetry that rhyme

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

1. Aeschylus
2. Aristophanes
3. Euripides
4. Sophocles

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

1. Robert Burns
2. Samuel Taylor Coleridge
3. William Blake
4. William Wordsworth

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

1. A Midsummer Night's Dream
2. As You Like It
3. The Tempest
4. Twelfth Night

17. What is the 'volta' in a sonnet?

1. A shift in thought or argument, usually at the 9th line
2. The final couplet
3. The opening quatrain
4. The rhyme scheme

18. Which American playwright wrote 'Death of a Salesman'?

1. Arthur Miller
2. Edward Albee
3. Eugene O'Neill
4. Tennessee Williams

19. What is 'alliteration' in poetry?

1. A comparison using 'like' or 'as'
2. The repetition of an initial consonant sound in nearby words
3. The repetition of the same end rhyme
4. The use of a word that imitates a sound

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

1. César Vallejo
2. Jorge Luis Borges
3. Octavio Paz
4. Pablo Neruda