Measure for Measure
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
6correct to beat the crowd
50 free Measure for Measure trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Measure for Measure is the Shakespeare play that refuses to sit comfortably. A ruler steps aside, a strict deputy revives a forgotten law, a young man is condemned, and his sister is offered a bargain no one should ever be offered. It has jokes, bawds and bumbling officers, yet it also holds some of the most unsettling scenes Shakespeare wrote about power and hypocrisy. This quiz covers the whole play: who rules, who schemes, who is tricked and how, and which characters speak the lines people still quote. A run of questions follows the story off the page, into its Italian sources, its first printing and performance, and the operas, poems, novels and films it inspired, along with the well-known actors who have played Angelo and Isabella. It suits students revising the text act by act, teachers who want a ready check on the reading, and theatregoers curious to find out how well the plot has stuck.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which city, ruled by the absent Duke Vincentio, does Shakespeare set Measure for Measure?
Vienna
Vienna is an odd home for a play full of Italian names, and some scholars argue the action was moved there from Italy when the text was later revised.
Q 02What disguise does Duke Vincentio wear to spy on his deputy Angelo in Measure for Measure?
A friar
A friar can go anywhere, so the Duke visits the prison, counsels the condemned Claudio and quietly steers the whole plot from under his hood.
Q 03What does Angelo demand from Isabella in return for sparing her brother Claudio in Measure for Measure?
Her virginity
Her virginity is the price, and Isabella refuses, declaring that her chastity matters more than her brother's life.
Q 04In Measure for Measure, the head sent to Angelo in place of Claudio's belonged to what kind of criminal?
A pirate
A pirate named Ragozine had died of fever in the prison that morning, and he happened to be Claudio's age with the same colour of beard.
Q 05How does Isabella answer in the text when Duke Vincentio proposes marriage at the end of Measure for Measure?
She says nothing
She says nothing: Shakespeare gives her no reply at all, so every production has to decide for itself what her silence means.
Q 06Despite its executions and blackmail, Measure for Measure was first printed under which heading?
Comedies
Comedies was the label and it has stuck, though one condemned man's speech on dying has been compared with the soliloquies of Hamlet.
Q 07Which actress played Isabella opposite John Cazale's Angelo at the New York Shakespeare Festival in 1976?
Meryl Streep
Meryl Streep headed a cast that also had Sam Waterston as the Duke and Jeffrey Tambor in one of the comic parts.
Q 08Which German composer based his early opera Das Liebesverbot on Shakespeare's Measure for Measure?
Richard Wagner
Richard Wagner conducted the 1836 premiere himself, and after it flopped the second performance was cancelled when a fist fight broke out backstage.
Q 09The title Measure for Measure echoes a verse about judging others in which book of the Bible?
Matthew
Matthew records the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus warns that people will be judged by the same standard they apply to others.
Q 10According to Isabella in Measure for Measure, it is excellent to have whose strength but tyrannous to use it?
A giant's
A giant's strength is her image for Angelo's new power, thrown at him moments after he tells her that her brother dies tomorrow.
Q 11Which jilted fiancée of Angelo secretly takes Isabella's place at a night-time meeting in Measure for Measure?
Mariana
Mariana still loves Angelo long after he dropped her, and the swap in the dark binds him to the marriage he had refused.
Q 12For which offence, long left unpunished under Duke Vincentio, is Claudio sentenced to death in Measure for Measure?
Fornication
Fornication carried death under an old statute nobody had enforced, and Claudio was engaged to the woman, lacking only the legal formalities.
Q 13What is Isabella preparing to become when her brother Claudio is arrested in Measure for Measure?
A nun
A nun in the making, she is about to join the sisterhood of Saint Clare and has just said she wishes its rules were stricter.
Q 21Measure for Measure reached print only in 1623, in which famous collection of Shakespeare's plays?
The First Folio
The First Folio is the only early text of the play, which sat unprinted for nearly twenty years after its first recorded performance.
Q 22Which label, coined by the critic F. S. Boas in 1896, is often given to Shakespeare's Measure for Measure?
Problem play
Problem play was a term borrowed from the social dramas of Ibsen, and Boas used it for Shakespeare works that sit uneasily between laughter and darkness.
Q 23The earliest recorded performance of Measure for Measure, in 1604, fell on which date in the Christmas season?
St Stephen's Night
Q 14What punishment does Duke Vincentio finally impose on the gossip who slandered him throughout Measure for Measure?
Marriage to a prostitute
Marriage to a prostitute, the mother of his abandoned child, is the sentence, and he protests that it is as bad as whipping and hanging.
Q 15Which hard-drinking prisoner in Measure for Measure flatly refuses to be executed on the day appointed?
Barnardine
Barnardine has spent nine years in the prison, often too drunk to care, and swears he will not die that day for any man's persuasion.
Q 16In Measure for Measure, who tells Isabella 'our doubts are traitors' as he urges her to plead with Angelo?
Lucio
Lucio, the play's loosest tongue, gives its most quoted advice, adding that doubts make us lose the good we might win by fearing to attempt.
Q 17Which pimp in Measure for Measure bears the surname Bum and the first name of a great Roman general?
Pompey
Pompey is teased for it in court, where the magistrate says his backside is the greatest thing about him, which makes him Pompey the Great.
Q 18Which constable in Measure for Measure muddles his words, calling two arrested men 'notorious benefactors'?
Elbow
Elbow means malefactors, as Angelo drily points out, and he goes on to tell the court that he detests his wife before heaven.
Q 19Which brothel keeper in Measure for Measure is said to have had nine husbands?
Mistress Overdone
Mistress Overdone was, her servant jokes, overdone by the last of them, and she is hauled off to prison when the brothels are shut.
Q 20Angelo abandoned his fiancée in Measure for Measure after her dowry was lost in what kind of disaster?
A shipwreck
A shipwreck drowned her brother Frederick, a famous soldier, along with the dowry he was carrying, and Angelo promptly dropped her.
St Stephen's Night is 26 December, so the first audience on record watched this tale of lust and beheading the day after Christmas.
Q 24Measure for Measure draws on a tale by which Italian writer, whose story collection also gave Shakespeare Othello?
Cinthio
Cinthio told the story as a bleak tragedy, in which the sister is forced to give in and her brother is killed anyway.
Q 25Some scholars argue that which Jacobean playwright revised Measure for Measure after Shakespeare's death?
Thomas Middleton
Thomas Middleton is the candidate of Gary Taylor and John Jowett, who see his style in patches of the text, though others call the idea an unproven hypothesis.
Q 26Which Victorian poet wrote an 1830 poem about the lonely wait of Angelo's jilted fiancée from Measure for Measure?
Alfred Tennyson
Alfred Tennyson ends his poem before the lover ever returns, and its despairing heroine went on to inspire a painting by John Everett Millais.
Q 27Which Russian poet reworked the plot of Measure for Measure into his 1833 verse tale Angelo?
Alexander Pushkin
Alexander Pushkin had started out translating the play, then turned it into a narrative poem with only a little dialogue left in.
Q 28Which Aldous Huxley novel takes its title from a line Isabella speaks to Angelo in Measure for Measure?
Ape and Essence
Ape and Essence borrows from her attack on proud man, whose glassy essence makes him play tricks before heaven like an angry ape.
Q 29Which German playwright's Round Heads and Pointed Heads began life as an adaptation of Measure for Measure?
Bertolt Brecht
Bertolt Brecht turned it into an anti-Nazi parable set in a land called Yahoo, whose rulers pit round heads against pointed heads.
Q 30Which actor stars as the Duke in the 2019 Australian film of Measure for Measure, set in a Melbourne housing block?
Hugo Weaving
Hugo Weaving leads a loose modern retelling dedicated to its co-writer Damian Hill, who died two days before filming was due to start.