Hamlet Trivia
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99 free Hamlet trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Hamlet trivia quiz covers Shakespeare's longest play from every angle: the plot and its body count, the characters from Claudius and Gertrude to Yorick and Fortinbras, the famous lines and who actually says them, the medieval Amleth legend and the lost Ur-Hamlet behind it, and the three very different early texts. It also takes in the play's afterlife on stage and screen, from Sarah Bernhardt and Richard Burbage to Olivier's Oscar-winning film, Branagh's four-hour uncut version, Mel Gibson, Ethan Hawke, David Tennant, Benedict Cumberbatch, The Lion King and Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. About a third of the questions are answerable by anyone who studied the play at school, a third are medium, and the rest are for people who know their Second Quarto from their First Folio. It works equally well as a literature-class quiz or a pub round. Every answer has been checked against an encyclopaedic source and each question links to the page that confirms it.
30 of 99 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What are the dying Hamlet's final words?
The rest is silence
The rest is silence, Hamlet says as he dies, and the friend at his side answers with a line almost as well known: 'Good night, sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.'
Q 02How is Claudius, who kills Hamlet's father and marries his mother, related to Hamlet?
His uncle
His uncle: Claudius is the dead king's brother, which is why Hamlet greets his new title of 'son' with the bitter pun 'A little more than kin, and less than kind'.
Q 03What is the name of Hamlet's mother?
Gertrude
Gertrude, Queen of Denmark, remarried within two months of her husband's death, the haste that makes Hamlet cry 'Frailty, thy name is woman' in his first soliloquy.
Q 04Which friend does the dying Hamlet charge to stay alive and tell his story?
Horatio
Horatio wants to die beside him, calling himself 'more an antique Roman than a Dane', but Hamlet stops him and begs him to 'absent thee from felicity awhile' and tell the story.
Q 05How does Hamlet kill the king's eavesdropping counsellor?
Stabbing him through a wall hanging
Stabbing him through a wall hanging is done blind: the old man cries out from behind the arras in the queen's room, and Hamlet thrusts without looking, hoping it is the king.
Q 06How does Ophelia die?
She drowns
She drowns when a willow branch breaks and drops her into a brook, the queen reports; a 1569 inquest on a drowned child named Jane Shaxspere, found in 2011, may have fed the scene.
Q 07Where does Ophelia's brother go at the start of the play, before returning in a rage in Act 4?
France
Ophelia's brother goes back to France; their father later sends the servant Reynaldo to Paris to check on how his son is behaving there.
Q 08Who is Ophelia's brother, who fights Hamlet in the final duel?
Laertes
Laertes, Ophelia's brother, fences Hamlet with an unbated, venom-tipped rapier; the weapons change hands in a scuffle and both men die of the same poison.
Q 09Which two old friends are sent to spy on Hamlet and later escort him to England?
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, summoned by the king to sound Hamlet out, carry sealed orders for his execution in England; Hamlet rewrites the commission so they die instead.
Q 10What is the title of the play Hamlet has the travelling actors perform to test Claudius's guilt?
The Murder of Gonzago
The Murder of Gonzago is the play Hamlet requests, adding a speech of his own; asked its name, he tells the king it is 'The Mousetrap', and the king stops the performance and storms out.
Q 11Why does Hamlet spare the king when he finds him alone after the play scene?
He is praying
He is praying, and Hamlet reasons that a man killed at prayer would go to heaven; the irony is that the king then admits his words never got there.
Q 12Whom does the dying Hamlet name as his successor to the Danish throne?
Fortinbras
Fortinbras, the Norwegian prince, receives Hamlet's 'dying voice' for the election and marches in as the play ends to claim the kingdom and order a soldier's funeral.
Q 13Whose skull does Hamlet hold in the graveyard scene?
Yorick's
Yorick's skull belongs to the old king's jester, who carried Hamlet on his back as a boy; the gravedigger's tally of 23 years in the earth is a much-argued clue that the prince is about thirty.
Q 21Which medieval Danish chronicler's 'Life of Amleth' is the main legendary source of Hamlet?
Saxo Grammaticus
Saxo Grammaticus told the Amleth story in Books III and IV of his Latin Gesta Danorum (c. 1200); his prince also feigns madness and kills an eavesdropper in his mother's chamber.
Q 22Which 2022 Robert Eggers film retells the Amleth legend with Alexander Skarsgård?
The Northman
The Northman goes back to the old Danish legend behind Hamlet: Skarsgård's Amleth flees as a boy when his father is murdered and years later poses as a slave to get onto the killer's farm.
Q 23What do scholars call the lost earlier play, possibly by Kyd, that Shakespeare may have reworked?
The Ur-Hamlet
Q 14Which company was left a pianist's skull in 1982 for use in Hamlet?
The Royal Shakespeare Company
The Royal Shakespeare Company received the skull of the pianist André Tchaikowsky, but it was used only in rehearsals until David Tennant held it on stage in 2008.
Q 15Moments after 'To be, or not to be', Hamlet turns on Ophelia with which famous command?
Get thee to a nunnery
Get thee to a nunnery comes in Act 3, Scene 1, straight after the soliloquy: Hamlet tells her he never loved her and that she should bear no children, while the king and his counsellor listen from hiding.
Q 16In the 1603 First Quarto of Hamlet, which words follow 'To be, or not to be'?
Aye, there's the point
Aye, there's the point is how the First Quarto prints it (spelling 'aye' as 'I'); a long-held theory blames an actor rebuilding the play from memory for such slips.
Q 17Which Hamlet character advises 'Neither a borrower nor a lender be' and 'To thine own self be true'?
Polonius
Polonius also coins 'Brevity is the soul of wit', a joke at his own expense, since it comes in the middle of his most long-winded speech.
Q 18Where does Hamlet rank by length among Shakespeare's plays?
The longest
The longest: at around 4,000 lines, an uncut Hamlet takes about four hours to perform.
Q 19What do scholars call the garbled 1603 First Quarto of Hamlet?
Bad quarto
Bad quarto is the usual label for a text far shorter than the versions that followed; it lay unknown until a copy turned up in 1823, and only two are known to survive.
Q 20The king's counsellor in Hamlet boasts of once acting which Roman, the title figure of a 1599 Shakespeare tragedy?
Julius Caesar
Julius Caesar is the part he claims ('I was killed i' the Capitol; Brutus killed me'), and since that play dates from 1599, the in-joke helps scholars place Hamlet between 1599 and 1601.
The Ur-Hamlet is known only from allusions: Thomas Nashe mocked 'whole Hamlets' of tragical speeches in 1589, and Thomas Lodge in 1596 recalled a ghost crying 'Hamlet, revenge'.
Q 24What was the name of Shakespeare's only son, who died in 1596 aged eleven?
Hamnet
Hamnet Shakespeare, twin of Judith, was buried in Stratford in August 1596; Hamnet and Hamlet were interchangeable spellings then, and Stephen Greenblatt links the father's grief to the tragedy.
Q 25At which German university has Hamlet been studying before the play begins?
Wittenberg
Wittenberg is where Hamlet wants to resume his studies, but the king calls the plan 'most retrograde to our desire' and he stays; the town is better known as Martin Luther's base.
Q 26Which real Danish castle at Helsingør is the Elsinore of Hamlet?
Kronborg
Kronborg guards the narrowest point of the sound between Denmark and Sweden; Hamlet has been staged there since 1816, and Jude Law played the prince in its courtyard in 2009.
Q 27For which leading actor of his company did Shakespeare almost certainly write the role of Hamlet?
Richard Burbage
Richard Burbage was the chief tragedian of the Lord Chamberlain's Men, and an elegy on his death in 1619 mourned that 'young Hamlet' had died with him, along with Lear and Othello.
Q 28Which actress played Hamlet in London in 1899 and filmed the duel scene a year later?
Sarah Bernhardt
Sarah Bernhardt played the prince in a French translation made for her, and her 1900 film of the duel was shown in Paris to the sound of clashing swords, in a programme that paired films with recordings.
Q 29Whose 1948 black-and-white Hamlet won Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Actor?
Laurence Olivier
Laurence Olivier directed as well as starred, and cast as his mother Eileen Herlie, who at 29 was eleven years younger than her screen son; it was the first British film to win Best Picture.
Q 30The 1948 film's prologue calls Hamlet the tragedy of a man who could not do what?
Make up his mind
'Make up his mind' is the film's phrase, not Shakespeare's: the director-star speaks the line in voice-over at the start, steering viewers to read the prince as fatally indecisive.