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50 free Twelfth Night trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Twelfth Night is the Shakespeare comedy people quote without realising it, from its opening line about music to the steward convinced his mistress adores him. Beneath the jokes it follows a shipwrecked girl who dresses as a boy, a countess in mourning who falls for the wrong messenger, and a household at war over whether anyone is allowed to have fun. These 50 questions cover the plot and its characters, the famous lines, the sources Shakespeare borrowed from and the night law students first saw it in 1602, then move through four centuries of stagings on radio, film and Broadway, the teen update She's the Man, and the midwinter festival that gives the play its name. It suits an English class, a theatre group or a pub quiz round with a Shakespeare theme. Play on your phone with instant explanations, or print it and read the questions aloud; every answer is cited to a reference page.
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Q 01What name does shipwrecked Viola adopt when she disguises herself as a page to the Duke of Illyria?
Cesario
Cesario is the page Olivia promptly falls for, and Viola keeps the disguise so long that her own twin is later mistaken for him.
Q 02Which character, in love with the idea of love, opens Twelfth Night with 'If music be the food of love, play on'?
Orsino
Orsino is a melancholy lover in love with the idea of love, and he ends the play engaged to the page he had been sending to woo somebody else.
Q 03Sir Toby Belch asks Malvolio whether, because he is virtuous, there shall be no more of what?
Cakes and ale
Cakes and ale is Sir Toby's retort in Act II, Scene 3, and it makes him the play's spokesman for revelry against the steward's killjoy rule.
Q 04The forged letter Malvolio reads says some are born great, some achieve greatness; how do the rest get it?
Thrust upon them
Greatness 'thrust upon them' is the line everyone credits to Malvolio, yet he is only reading aloud words a waiting-woman forged in Olivia's hand.
Q 05In English Twelfth Night cake tradition a bean made its finder king; what hidden token made a woman queen?
A pea
A pea crowned the queen while the bean crowned the king, and Robert Herrick's 1648 poem has both toasted with bowls of 'lamb's-wool', a spiced ale.
Q 06Which 1998 Best Picture winner ends with an order to write 'something more cheerful next time, for Twelfth Night'?
Shakespeare in Love
Shakespeare in Love closes with Elizabeth I commissioning a comedy for the holiday, and its final image is a woman named Viola, disguised as a man, arriving in a strange land.
Q 07For how many years does Olivia vow to veil her face in mourning for her brother in Twelfth Night?
Seven
Seven years of refusing all suitors is Olivia's vow, and she abandons it almost at once for the Duke's disguised messenger.
Q 08Counting Christmas Day as the first of the Twelve Days, the Church of England keeps Twelfth Night on which date?
5 January
5 January is Epiphany Eve, and churches that begin counting on 26 December land the festival a day later, on the evening of Epiphany itself.
Q 09Who forges the love letter in Olivia's handwriting that tricks the steward Malvolio into wooing his own mistress?
Maria
Maria, Olivia's waiting-gentlewoman, plots the letter to punish Malvolio for breaking up a late-night party, and ends the play married to Sir Toby.
Q 10Which foolish knight, a rival suitor to Olivia, is goaded into a duel with Viola in her page disguise?
Sir Andrew Aguecheek
Sir Andrew Aguecheek is being bled of his money by Sir Toby, who stages the duel knowing that neither the knight nor the terrified 'page' can fight.
Q 11Which fool attached to Olivia's household sings 'O Mistress Mine' and 'Come Away, Death' in Twelfth Night?
Feste
Feste is named only once in the whole play, when the Duke asks who sang to him the night before, and he moonlights entertaining at the Duke's house too.
Q 12Under which curate's name does Olivia's fool torment the imprisoned Malvolio in Twelfth Night?
Sir Topas
Sir Topas is a voice the fool puts on at the cell door, insisting Malvolio is mad whatever he says and demanding he accept Pythagoras's doctrine of reincarnation.
Q 13Which sea captain, an old enemy of the Duke, rescues Sebastian and follows him into hostile Illyria?
Antonio
Q 21Before settling on a page's role, Viola first asks the sea captain to present her to the Duke as what?
A eunuch
A eunuch is Viola's first plan for getting into the Duke's service, an idea the play quietly drops once she appears at court as a young page.
Q 22Illyria, where Twelfth Night is set, was a real ancient region on the eastern shore of which sea?
Adriatic
Adriatic Illyria covered today's Albania and Montenegro and became a Roman province, yet the play fills it with London in-jokes.
Q 23Elizabethan Twelfth Night revels were run by which temporary master who called for songs and mummery?
Lord of Misrule
Antonio's devotion gets him arrested by the Duke's officers when he interrupts a duel, mistaking the disguised Viola for the twin he saved.
Q 14Which token from Olivia, carried by her steward, tells the disguised Viola that the countess has fallen for her?
A ring
A ring is the pretext, and Viola's soliloquy on it admits that only time can untangle a knot too hard for her to untie.
Q 15Twelfth Night calls Malvolio 'a kind of' what, the sect that fought Epiphany revels in Shakespeare's day?
Puritan
Puritan killjoys really did fight Epiphany celebrations, and some scholars think Malvolio was modelled on Sir Thomas Posthumous Hoby, a litigious Yorkshire landowner.
Q 16Malvolio's name, apt for Twelfth Night's sour steward, comes from the Italian for what?
Ill will
Ill will is what the Italian 'mal volio' spells out, and the steward lives up to it as the vain, pompous and authoritarian head of Olivia's household.
Q 17Where is Malvolio confined, in the period's usual cure for madness, after following the letter's absurd orders?
A dark room
A dark room was the Elizabethan cure for lunacy, and the fool visits the prisoner there both as himself and in the voice of a curate.
Q 18When Olivia asks the disguised Viola 'Are you a comedian?', what does the Elizabethan word mean?
An actor
An actor is what 'comedian' meant, one of several moments where Twelfth Night winks at the audience about its own play-acting.
Q 19Which inn, sharing its name with a pub near the Globe, does Sebastian's rescuer call the best lodging in Illyria?
The Elephant
The Elephant was a real pub not far from the Globe Theatre, one of several London in-jokes tucked into Shakespeare's supposedly Illyrian setting.
Q 20From which city do the twins Viola and Sebastian hail, the home Viola names when she is reunited with her brother?
Messaline
Messaline is the answer Viola gives when Sebastian asks her parentage in the final scene; he had earlier told Antonio he was 'that Sebastian of Messaline'.
The Lord of Misrule presided over licensed disorder, and the play is often read as preserving that topsy-turvy mood, with a steward humbled and a servant wed to a knight.
Q 24Law student John Manningham saw the first recorded Twelfth Night at a feast in the hall of which Inn of Court?
Middle Temple
Middle Temple Hall still stands, and Shakespeare's Globe restaged the play there in 2002 to mark the premiere's 400th anniversary, exactly where law students had watched it.
Q 25Twelfth Night leans on Gl'ingannati, a 1531 comedy written collectively by an academy in which Italian city?
Siena
Siena's Accademia degli Intronati wrote 'The Deceived Ones' as a group, and the diarist who saw the 1602 premiere already spotted its likeness to the 'Inganni' plays.
Q 26Whose 1581 'Farewell to Military Profession' supplied Twelfth Night's source tale 'Of Apollonius and Silla'?
Barnabe Rich
Barnabe Rich claimed the story as his own invention, though it actually descends from a tale by Matteo Bandello, the Italian who also fed Romeo and Juliet.
Q 27Which palace held Elizabeth I's Twelfth Night revels of 1601, for which some scholars say the play was commissioned?
Whitehall
Whitehall's guest that night was Virginio Orsini, Duke of Bracciano, and sceptics reply that court etiquette would never let a comedy name its lead after the visitor.
Q 28After Malvolio storms off swearing revenge on the whole pack of them, whom does the Duke send to placate him?
Fabian
Fabian also confesses the whole plot against the steward in the final scene, revealing that Sir Toby has married the letter's forger.
Q 29Which gathering of bishops in AD 567 declared the days from Christmas to Epiphany one festive season?
Council of Tours
The Council of Tours also fixed Advent fasting, and one theory says the twelve-day span helped Rome reconcile its solar calendar with its eastern provinces' lunar ones.
Q 30Which London theatre has served its company a Twelfth Night cake since 1795, paid for by Robert Baddeley's will?
Drury Lane
Drury Lane's Theatre Royal has kept up Baddeley's £100 bequest for more than 200 years, the money invested to buy cake and punch for the resident company every 6 January.