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This Romeo and Juliet trivia quiz has 50 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 01Which Shakespeare play, also set in the lovers' city, shares its setting with Romeo and Juliet?
Two Gentlemen of Verona
The Taming of the Shrew is also set in Verona; it is unknown whether Shakespeare ever visited Italy.
Q 02Which two feuding families do the lovers belong to?
Montague and Capulet
Romeo is a Montague and Juliet a Capulet.
Q 03Before he meets Juliet, Romeo is lovesick over which unseen Capulet niece?
Rosaline
He goes to the Capulet ball hoping to see her, and never mentions her again after meeting Juliet.
Q 04Who marries Romeo and Juliet in secret, hoping to reconcile the families?
Friar Laurence
He later gives Juliet the potion that mimics death for 'two and forty hours'.
Q 05Who kills Mercutio?
Tybalt
Mercutio is wounded as Romeo tries to break up the fight, and dies cursing both houses.
Q 06Complete Mercutio's dying curse: 'A plague o' both your...'
houses
Friar Laurence recounts at the end that the curse has been fulfilled.
Q 07What punishment does the Prince impose on Romeo for slaying Juliet's cousin?
Exile from the city
He is banished under penalty of death if he ever returns; he flees to Mantua.
Q 08Whom do Juliet's parents insist she marry, triggering the potion plot?
Count Paris
Capulet threatens to disown her when she refuses to be Paris's 'joyful bride'.
Q 09For how long is the friar's potion supposed to keep Juliet in a deathlike sleep?
Forty-two hours
He plans to send Friar John to tell Romeo, but plague quarantine stops the message.
Q 10Why does the messenger friar fail to deliver the crucial letter to Romeo in Mantua?
A plague outbreak halts travel
Romeo instead hears from his servant Balthasar that Juliet is dead.
Q 11From whom does Romeo buy his poison?
An apothecary
He then kills Paris at the tomb before drinking it.
Q 12How does Juliet die?
Stabs herself with Romeo's dagger
In da Porto's earlier version she simply held her breath until she died.
Q 13The play's final couplet begins 'For never was a story of more woe...'. How does it end?
Than this of Juliet and her Romeo
The Prince speaks the elegy over the three bodies at the tomb.
Q 21The Nurse's 'eleven years' earthquake reference dates the play to 1591 via which quake?
Dover Straits 1580
Stylistic links to A Midsummer Night's Dream suggest 1594-95 instead.
Q 22Roughly how many references to time does the play contain, sustaining its illusion of speed?
103
Characters constantly cite days of the week and hours of the day.
Q 23Which diarist called the play 'the worst that I ever heard in my life' in 1662?
Samuel Pepys
Dryden, ten years later, praised Mercutio and claimed Shakespeare had to kill him off in Act 3 'to prevent being killed by him'.
Q 14The play's prologue, spoken by a Chorus, takes which poetic form?
A 14-line sonnet
It introduces the 'star-cross'd lovers'; most of the play is in blank verse.
Q 15Shakespeare's main direct source was a 1562 English narrative poem by whom?
Arthur Brooke
Brooke translated a French version of Bandello's Italian tale.
Q 16Which Ovid myth of lovers kept apart by feuding parents, with a false death report, is an ancestor of Romeo and Juliet?
Pyramus and Thisbe
The mechanicals perform it in A Midsummer Night's Dream, written around the same time.
Q 17Which Italian writer's 1524 version first named Romeo and Juliet and introduced Mercutio?
Luigi da Porto
He may have drawn on his own thwarted love for Lucina Savorgnan after a 1511 ball in Udine.
Q 18The names Montecchi and Cappelletti appear in canto six of Purgatorio by which poet?
Dante
Dante was scolding Italy's warring factions, not telling a love story.
Q 19Which character did Bandello add to the story in 1554?
Benvolio
Da Porto had already supplied Mercutio, Tybalt, Paris and the nurse.
Q 20The first printed edition of the play, Q1 of 1597, is known as what?
The bad quarto
Its garbled text is thought to be a memorial reconstruction by one or two actors.
Q 24Which 18th-century actor-manager's cleaned-up version of the play held the stage for nearly a century?
David Garrick
Shakespeare's original text did not return to the American stage until 1845.
Q 25In 1845, which actress played Romeo opposite her own sister as Juliet?
Charlotte Cushman
The Times called her Romeo genius, and she ran for eighty-four performances.
Q 26In Gielgud's 1935 production, Gielgud and which actor swapped Romeo and Mercutio six weeks into the run?
Laurence Olivier
Peggy Ashcroft was Juliet, and the Elizabethan staging set a fashion for historical realism.
Q 27Which character has the third-largest number of lines in the play, after the two title roles?
The Nurse
She was Juliet's wet nurse and had a daughter of her own, Susan, who died in infancy.
Q 28Mercutio's famous fantastical speech in Act 1 is about which fairy?
Queen Mab
He is a kinsman of the Prince, able to mingle with both feuding families.
Q 29Scholar Molly Mahood counted at least how many puns and wordplays in the text?
175
Many are sexual, especially those involving Mercutio.
Q 30What was the combined age of Norma Shearer and Leslie Howard, the teenage lovers in the 1936 MGM film?
Over 75
Audiences found it too 'arty', and Hollywood abandoned Shakespeare for over a decade.