Romeo and Juliet
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This Romeo and Juliet trivia quiz has 99 free questions with answers and covers Shakespeare's play from the prologue sonnet to the Prince's last couplet: the feud, Rosaline, the Nurse, Mercutio's Queen Mab speech, the potion and the plague that stops Friar John, then the sources in Ovid, da Porto, Bandello and Arthur Brooke, the 'bad quarto' of 1597, Pepys hating it, Garrick and Charlotte Cushman rewriting and restoring it, and the long trail of adaptations from Gounod, Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev to Zeffirelli, Baz Luhrmann's Verona Beach, West Side Story, Gnomeo & Juliet, Warm Bodies and Taylor Swift. The first questions are school-level; the last will test English teachers. Every question is multiple choice with a short explanation after you answer, so it works for revision or a literature round at trivia night. Every answer has been checked against a primary source, and each question links to the page that confirms it.
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Q 01The prologue of Romeo and Juliet famously calls the doomed pair what kind of lovers?
Star-crossed
Star-crossed means thwarted by the stars: before the story starts, the Chorus tells the audience that the lovers will die and that only their deaths will end their parents' feud.
Q 02In Romeo and Juliet, Juliet argues that which flower would smell as sweet whatever it was called?
A rose
A rose: Juliet is thinking aloud that Romeo would be just as dear without his family name, with no idea that he is hidden in the orchard below, hearing every word.
Q 03Before he meets Juliet, Romeo is lovesick over which unseen Capulet niece?
Rosaline
Rosaline has sworn to stay chaste, and Romeo gatecrashes the Capulet feast only in the hope of seeing her; one look at Juliet there and he forgets her.
Q 04Who marries Romeo and Juliet in secret, hoping to reconcile the families?
Friar Laurence
Friar Laurence loses his nerve when it matters most: hearing the watch approach, he flees the tomb and leaves the newly woken Juliet alone with her dead husband.
Q 05In Shakespeare's tragedy, who kills Mercutio?
Tybalt
Tybalt's sword gets through only because Romeo steps between the two men to stop the fight, and Mercutio is run through under his friend's arm.
Q 06In Romeo and Juliet, the dying Mercutio curses 'both your' what?
houses
Houses, meaning the two feuding families: Mercutio belongs to neither, being the Prince's kinsman, yet their quarrel kills him, and he gasps out the curse three times.
Q 07What punishment does the Prince impose on Romeo for slaying Juliet's cousin?
Exile from the city
Exile from the city is the Prince's mercy, since the law demanded death, yet Romeo calls banishment 'torture, and not mercy' because it parts him from Juliet.
Q 08Whom do Juliet's parents insist she marry, triggering the potion plot?
Count Paris
Count Paris is first told to wait two years because Juliet is so young; then, after her cousin is killed, her father abruptly fixes the wedding for that same week.
Q 09In Romeo and Juliet, the friar's potion should keep Juliet in a deathlike sleep for roughly how long?
Two days
About two days: the friar says 'two and forty hours', long enough for her family to lay her in their vault, where he means Romeo to be waiting when she wakes.
Q 10In Romeo and Juliet, why does the friar's letter fail to reach Romeo?
A plague outbreak halts travel
A plague outbreak halts travel: the friar carrying the letter is quarantined before he can set out, so the only word to reach Romeo is his servant's report that Juliet is dead.
Q 11In Romeo and Juliet, from whom does Romeo buy his poison?
An apothecary
An apothecary, so hungry and ragged that Romeo can talk him into breaking the law: selling such poison carried the death penalty, and he says his poverty consents, not his will.
Q 12In Romeo and Juliet, how does Juliet die?
Stabs herself with Romeo's dagger
Stabs herself with Romeo's dagger: she first kisses his lips in the hope that some poison still clings to them, then hears the watch coming and has no time for anything slower.
Q 13The last line of Romeo and Juliet says no story held more woe 'than this of' whom?
Juliet and her Romeo
Q 21In Romeo and Juliet, the friar warns Romeo that 'these violent delights have violent' what?
ends
Ends: the friar likens sudden passion to fire meeting gunpowder, used up in the instant they touch, and urges Romeo to 'love moderately' instead.
Q 22Which diarist called Romeo and Juliet 'the worst that ever I heard in my life' after seeing it in 1662?
Samuel Pepys
Samuel Pepys saw the play's first night on 1 March 1662 and found the actors so unsure of their lines that he vowed never again to watch a play on its opening performance.
Q 23Which 18th-century actor-manager's cleaned-up version of Romeo and Juliet held the stage for nearly a century?
David Garrick
'Juliet and her Romeo': the Prince names her first so that 'Romeo' can rhyme with 'woe', and speaks the couplet as the two fathers at last shake hands over their children's bodies.
Q 14The prologue of Romeo and Juliet, spoken by a Chorus, takes which poetic form?
A sonnet
A sonnet: Shakespeare returns to the form when the lovers first speak, sharing fourteen rhyming lines about pilgrims and saints that end in their first kiss.
Q 15Which Ovid myth of forbidden lovers, where one wrongly thinks the other dead, is an ancestor of Romeo and Juliet?
Pyramus and Thisbe
Pyramus and Thisbe is also the play the bungling workmen stage in A Midsummer Night's Dream, written around the same time, so Shakespeare told one story as both tragedy and farce.
Q 16Which famous feature of Romeo and Juliet's best-known scene did later stagings add to Shakespeare's text?
The balcony
The balcony: Shakespeare only has Juliet appear 'above' at a window, and the word never occurs in the play; adapters gave her one generations after his death.
Q 17Factions called Montecchi and Cappelletti appear in a 14th-century epic poem by which Italian writer?
Dante
Dante names them in his Purgatorio only as one more pair of Italy's quarrelling factions, with no lovers in sight; the romance was attached to the names some two centuries later.
Q 18Which cousin of Romeo tries to break up the opening street brawl, crying 'Part, fools!'?
Benvolio
Benvolio draws only to part the servants, but Tybalt arrives, sneers that he hates the word peace and turns the scuffle into a riot; halfway through the play Benvolio simply vanishes.
Q 19As she bids Romeo good night, Juliet calls parting 'such sweet' what?
sorrow
Sorrow: she says she could go on bidding him good night 'till it be morrow', and by then the pair have already agreed to marry, within hours of first meeting.
Q 20Some scholars date Romeo and Juliet to 1591 because a character recalls which event 'eleven years' earlier?
An earthquake
An earthquake: the line was read as a nod to the tremor that shook London in April 1580, though the play's style links it to others written around 1594-95.
David Garrick cut the bawdy jokes but kept one crowd-pleasing change from earlier adapters: Juliet wakes before Romeo dies, giving the lovers a last farewell Shakespeare never wrote.
Q 24At the end of Romeo and Juliet, what do the grieving fathers vow to raise for the lovers?
Statues of pure gold
Statues of pure gold: Montague offers one of Juliet and Capulet matches it with one of Romeo, but peace comes too late for Lady Montague, who has died of grief that very night.
Q 25In Romeo and Juliet, Juliet insists the bird singing at dawn is the nightingale, not which other bird?
The lark
The lark sings at daybreak, and daybreak means Romeo must leave or be killed; Juliet gives up the pretence moments later and hurries him away herself.
Q 26Which character carries secret messages between Romeo and Juliet and fetches the rope ladder for their wedding night?
The Nurse
The Nurse later betrays that trust, urging Juliet to forget her husband and take the match her parents want, and Juliet never confides in her again.
Q 27Mercutio's fantastical Act 1 speech in Romeo and Juliet is about which fairy?
Queen Mab
Queen Mab, the fairies' midwife, rides a tiny chariot over sleepers' noses and hands each the dream they crave; Mercutio conjures her up to mock Romeo for trusting a dream.
Q 28Fatally wounded in Romeo and Juliet, Mercutio jokes that tomorrow he will be what kind of man?
Grave
A grave man, meaning both solemn and buried: Mercutio keeps punning to the last, dismissing the fatal wound as 'a scratch' even as he sends for a surgeon.
Q 29How did Leslie Howard and Norma Shearer, stars of MGM's 1936 Romeo and Juliet, differ from Shakespeare's lovers?
Were decades older
They were decades older: Howard was 43 and both stars were at least twice the lovers' age, in a film that producer Irving Thalberg built around Shearer, his wife.
Q 30Who directed the 1968 film of Romeo and Juliet starring teenagers Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey?
Franco Zeffirelli
Franco Zeffirelli had already staged the play at London's Old Vic in 1960, with Judi Dench as Juliet, and built the film on that production, this time shooting on location in Italy.