Shakespeare Quote Quiz

How well do you know your Shakespeare? Our Shakespeare Quote Quiz challenges you to name that play and see how many quotes you can identify correctly. Even if you don’t think you know for sure, give it a try. So many of the quotes are in modern culture that you might recognize them by their familiarity. We have a word and phrase search and glossary to help you identify passages, explore works, or if you simply get stuck.

Who was William Shakespeare?

Though written over 400 years ago, Shakespeare’s sharply written plays and sonnets could be on the New York Times bestseller list if only the English were updated. Betrayal, love, intrigue, political backstabbing: the plots are timeless. The Lion King is Hamlet rewritten, as are countless other works.

William Shakespeare was an English playwright, poet, and actor. He was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in April 1564 and he died in April 1616. By the late 1580s he was in London. The works are written in Early Modern English, and he is credited with inventing new words, writing sayings we use to this day, and combining existing words to make new ones. He was particually good in inventing insults. In 1599 he bacame a shareholder in the Globe Theatre, which gave him a cut of the box office on top of what he earned for writing his plays.

Shakespeare stands larger than life, and given the amount of lore around him, it is difficult to know with certainty the exact number of works he wrote. It is known that he wrote at least 37 plays, 154 sonnets, and four poems: the narrative poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, along with the shorter A Lover’s Complaint and The Phoenix and the Turtle. What is under spirited dispute is the number of plays attributed to him. The First Folio, published in 1623, had 36. Editions published in the 18th and 19th centuries added Pericles, making the count 37, while the modern RSC edition added The Two Noble Kinsmen, getting it to 38. Finally, the Folger adds Cardenio (now lost), bringing the grand total to 39. If that were not enough argument, Titus Andronicus, Timon of Athens, Pericles, Henry VIII, and The Two Noble Kinsmen are, in modern times, considered collaborations, and the beloved Macbeth includes revisions from fellow playwright Thomas Middleton.

Two of his friends, John Heminges and Henry Condell, published the First Folio of his work seven years after his death.

This Folio joined the Quarto editions were published while Shakespeare was alive. The Folio and Quartos deviate somewhat from each other, which is why there is still debate over Shakespeare’s exact words.

How to play our Shakespeare Quote Quiz

Read the line, then name the play that it comes from. After each guess, a note opens with the act, scene, and speaker, so the answer doubles as a small lesson in placement. Where a line sits differently across the early texts, the note flags the Quarto and Folio history.

Set the round however you like before you start:

• Mode. Name the Play draws only from the 37 dramatic works. Name the Work widens the field to include the sonnets and the narrative poems.
• Question type. Multiple choice gives you four options. Free response asks you to type the work, with autocomplete to help, and is the harder test of recall.
• Difficulty. Easy questions draw their wrong answers from across the canon, so they are easy to rule out. Hard questions pull decoys from the same genre, so a tragedy hides among tragedies.
• Category and length. Narrow to one genre if you want focused drilling, and pick how many questions you face per round.

Your score and current streak sit at the top as you go. At the end, you get a breakdown by genre and by difficulty, so you can see where your gaps are.