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40 free Drama and Theatre trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Theatre is the art form that leaves nothing behind. A performance exists for a couple of hours and then survives only in memory, which is why its history is a history of arguments: what Aristotle actually meant, whether boys or women should play the heroines, who gets to censor a script, and what a director is allowed to call a stage. These 40 questions follow that history from the Athenian festivals through the Italian comedians, the Japanese puppet and mask traditions, the penny yards of Elizabethan London and the scandalous first actresses, to the playwrights who rebuilt the form in Scandinavia, Germany, Spain, America and Britain. Alongside them sit the working words of the rehearsal room, the backstage superstitions and the institutions that hand out the prizes and train the next generation. It is pitched for drama students revising their terminology, theatre lovers who want more than musical trivia, and quiz setters who need a rigorous, sourced set with one-line explanations.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which word for a two-faced person comes from the ancient Greek term for a stage actor?
Hypocrite
Hypocrite descends from the Greek hypokrites, a technical term for a stage actor that Athenians thought no fit role for a public figure. Roman disdain for actors helped push the word toward its modern sense.
Q 02Which Theban tragedy, Aristotle's model in the Poetics, won only second prize when first staged?
Oedipus Rex
Oedipus Rex won only second place at its first performance, yet Aristotle's Poetics cites it repeatedly as the tragedy that best fits his rules for the genre. Its hero blinds himself on learning he killed his father and married his mother.
Q 03Which comedy was on at Ford's Theatre when Lincoln was shot, the gunshot timed to a laugh line?
Our American Cousin
Our American Cousin was the comedy John Wilkes Booth, a Confederate sympathiser and stage actor, chose so that his gunshot would be masked by the audience's laughter at a famous line. Lincoln watched from the presidential box.
Q 04Which stage wish replaces 'good luck', traced by one theory to German pilots' Hals- und Beinbruch?
Break a leg
Break a leg is the English stage idiom for wishing a performer good luck, since saying the words outright is thought to invite the opposite. German has Hals- und Beinbruch, 'neck and leg break', which Luftwaffe pilots used as a luck wish.
Q 05Which orange-seller turned comic actress, praised by Pepys, became a mistress of Charles II?
Nell Gwyn
Nell Gwyn began as a teenage orange-girl hawking sixpenny 'china' oranges inside the theatre before joining its actresses at about 14. Pepys praised her comic performances, and she became best known as Charles II's mistress.
Q 06Which festival was born in 1947 when eight theatre companies turned up uninvited to perform?
Edinburgh Fringe
The Edinburgh Fringe started when eight companies arrived uninvited at the inaugural Edinburgh International Festival and performed anyway, giving the world the term 'fringe theatre'. It now fills the city each summer.
Q 07Which stage direction, the rear of the acting area, gives its name to an actor who steals a scene?
Upstage
Upstage is the part of the stage furthest from the audience, so an actor who drifts there forces scene partners to turn their backs on the house to face them, which is where 'upstaging' comes from.
Q 08What title has a Punch and Judy puppeteer had since Victorian times, often helped by a 'bottler'?
Professor
A Punch and Judy puppeteer has been called a professor since Victorian times, sometimes assisted by a 'bottler' who works the crowd and collects the money. Punch's squawk comes from a swazzle held in the performer's mouth.
Q 09Which Muse, often shown with a tragic mask and buskins, presides over tragedy in Greek mythology?
Melpomene
Melpomene is the Muse of tragedy, her name meaning 'to sing' or 'the melodious one', and artists give her a tragic mask, buskins and a crown of leaves. Her sister Thalia presides over comedy.
Q 10Which Athenian tragedian did Aristotle credit with adding a third actor and painted scenery?
Sophocles
Sophocles is credited by Aristotle with the third actor, which shrank the chorus's role, and with skenographia, or scene-painting, though rival sources hand the first to Aeschylus and the second to Agatharchus of Samos.
Q 11Which Greek tragedian, 'the most tragic of poets' to Aristotle, survives in nineteen plays?
Euripides
Euripides was called 'the most tragic of poets' by Aristotle, probably for his taste for unhappy endings, and nineteen of his plays survive more or less complete, though Rhesus is often doubted. An alphabetical edition survived by luck.
Q 12Which term did Aristotle use for the relief of pity and fear that tragedy works on its audience?
Catharsis
Catharsis is Aristotle's word for what tragedy does 'through pity and fear', and scholars still argue whether he meant a purging, a purification or a rebalancing of those emotions. He first used the term of music, in the Politics.
Q 13Which Poetics term, usually rendered 'tragic flaw', comes from a verb meaning to miss the mark?
Q 21Which Japanese puppet theatre has three black-robed puppeteers work each main figure in full view?
Bunraku
Bunraku puppets need three visible puppeteers for all but the smallest parts, while a single chanter voices every character; the form took its name from an Osaka theatre opened in 1805. Chikamatsu wrote its classic plays.
Q 22Who took the female roles on Elizabethan stages, apprenticed for two or three years, not seven?
Boy players
Boy players took the female roles because women were barred from the English public stage, serving adult companies as short-term apprentices until actresses replaced them after the Restoration. Some boys' companies played every part.
Q 23Which penny-paying playgoers stood in the yard of Elizabethan playhouses, jeered as 'stinkards'?
Hamartia
Hamartia derives from hamartanein, 'to miss the mark', and Aristotle meant a morally neutral error of judgement rather than the character defect that 'tragic flaw' implies. Critics have argued over the gap between the two ever since.
Q 14Which comic playwright's The Clouds mocked Socrates so sharply that Plato blamed it for his trial?
Aristophanes
Aristophanes caricatured Socrates as a sophist in The Clouds, and Plato singled out the play as slander that helped bring on the philosopher's condemnation, though other satirists had mocked him too. He may have been barely 18 at his debut.
Q 15Which heroine defies King Creon's decree, buries her brother Polynices and is sent to a living tomb?
Antigone
Antigone places her bond with her dead brother above human law and is walled up alive for it, while her sister Ismene refuses to share the deed. Creon's change of heart comes too late to save her.
Q 16Which morality play has God send Death for its hero, whom only Good Deeds will follow to the grave?
Everyman
Everyman is deserted by Fellowship, Kindred, Goods and even Beauty and Strength, and only Good Deeds, too weak at first to stand, goes with him to his reckoning. The English text translates the Dutch play Elckerlijc.
Q 17Which Bavarian village has kept a plague-time vow with a Passion Play every ten years since 1634?
Oberammergau
Oberammergau's villagers vowed to perform the Passion every ten years if God spared them from the plague; nobody there died of it after the vow, and the first performance followed in 1634. The 1934 season marked 300 years of the promise.
Q 18Which nimble commedia dell'arte servant wears a costume of irregular patches and pursues Columbine?
Harlequin
Harlequin, Arlecchino in Italian, is the astute servant forever thwarting his master and competing with the melancholy Pierrot for Columbine; his diamond-shaped patches were a 17th-century Paris fashion adaptation.
Q 19Which commedia dell'arte character arrived in England as a marionette in 1662 and became Mr Punch?
Pulcinella
Pulcinella was first seen in England in May 1662, when the Bologna-born puppeteer Pietro Gimonde worked a marionette in Covent Garden; the name became Punchinello, then simply Punch. As half of Punch and Judy he is now a British icon.
Q 20Which actor-playwright, taught Noh by his father Kan'ami, refined it at shogun Yoshimitsu's court?
Zeami
Zeami was performing for the shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu while still a boy and was schooled at his court in classical literature and philosophy, then wrote the treatises that still define Noh. His fortunes fell under the next shogun.
Groundlings
Groundlings paid a single penny to stand in the yard, or pit, just below the stage, while a second penny bought a seat and a third a cushion in the best spot. Commoners, they were also called penny-stinkers.
Q 24Which musical's London opening waited until the Lord Chamberlain lost his power to license plays?
Hair
Hair was refused a licence by the Lord Chamberlain, London's stage censor, so its West End opening was held back until the Theatres Act 1968 abolished his powers; it opened at the Shaftesbury Theatre on 27 September 1968.
Q 25Which Webster tragedy has a widow strangled on her brothers' orders for secretly marrying Antonio?
The Duchess of Malfi
The Duchess of Malfi is strangled at her brothers' request for marrying beneath her, and her maid Cariola is throttled too after a fierce struggle, in one of the bloodiest of the Jacobean revenge tragedies.
Q 26Which role did Margaret Hughes play in December 1660 as the first woman known on the English stage?
Desdemona
Desdemona in Othello was the part Margaret Hughes played for Thomas Killigrew's King's Company at its Vere Street theatre on 8 December 1660, the earliest recorded appearance of a woman on an English stage. Pepys saw her play it in 1669.
Q 27Who in Sheridan's The Rivals is 'as headstrong as an allegory on the banks of the Nile'?
Mrs Malaprop
Mrs Malaprop gave English the word 'malapropism', and her other gems in Sheridan's comedy include 'the very pineapple of politeness' and 'illiterate him quite from your memory'. The same slip is also called a Dogberryism.
Q 28Which Victorian stage genre, named from the Greek for 'song', ran its action to orchestral music?
Melodrama
Melodrama comes from the Greek melos, 'song', plus the French drame, and in its strict Victorian sense meant a play whose action ran to orchestral music or song. The word reached English in 1784.
Q 29Which New York-born actor, a London Othello at 17 in 1825, later played before the King of Prussia?
Ira Aldridge
Ira Aldridge became the first African-American actor to build a professional career abroad, touring Europe for four decades and collecting honours from heads of state; he died on tour in Łódź in 1867.
Q 30Which Swedish playwright's Miss Julie, with its preface on naturalism, answered Zola's call to arms?
August Strindberg
August Strindberg wrote The Father, Miss Julie and Creditors as naturalistic dramas answering Zola's manifesto, while rejecting the well-made-play structure Ibsen had kept. In Miss Julie, character replaces plot as the driving element.