my shakespeare quiz

1. In Henry V, Henry delivers the stirring St. Crispin's Day speech to his troops on the eve of the Battle of Agincourt. Why doesn't Henry just take the train to Agincourt? It's really affordable.

2. When Hamlet says “To a nunnery! Go!” who is he talking to? Ophelia is dead at that point. He's already strangled her. On top of which he's kneeling with his knee on her throat, so it's unlikely that she'd even get to the nearest water fountain, let alone a convent.

3. In The Tempest, why does Prospero say that “we are such stuff as dreams are made on”? Prospero is a former Duke of Naples. Shouldn't he be speaking a Neopolitan dialect of Italian?

4. Many critics believe that the plays and poems of Shakespeare were written by someone else. Could that 'someone' actually be Shakespeare writing under a pseudonym that was also Shakespeare? He was hiding his true identity from the Templars. And that identity... was H.G. Wells. Or Boba Fett.

5. Hey, do you remember that bit in Inception where the guy is driving the van, and there's an entire dramatic chase scene through pouring rain, and the reason it's raining is because he has to pee and the chase scene is taking place in his dream? So really, he's driving through his own pee? And then the van falls into a river? I'm pretty sure the character wet himself at that point. Do you think the character wears adult diapers? Should Nolan have established that earlier? Maybe there should have been an extra twenty-minute scene about adult diapers? What if a character was eating crackers, and then everyone went into his dream and things were, like, extra crunchy?

6. The character of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice has been held up an example of Shakespeare's anti-Semitism. Don't you think that Festus from Twelfth Night should be held up as an example of Shakespeare's hatred of his paying audience? That dude was seriously annoying.

7. Scholars have discovered that the character of Kate in The Taming of the Shrew was actually meant to be played by a trained shrew. This explains why the character attempts to eat her own weight in leaves and insects throughout the play.

8. Pop quiz: Does King Lear a) father or b) contract Goneril in the course of the play? Bear in mind that he goes blind and crazy.

9. You're walking through the woods. Titania, queen of the Faeries, wanders up and declares her love for you. What do you say?

a) “Hey, I got this ass head for a ducat in Elsinore, you like? Yeah, you like”.

b) “I got ninety-nine problems but an ass-head ain't one”.

c) “I'm a rude mechanical and you're a sprite botanical. Let's get together, 'cause Oberon's tyrannical”.

d) “All the other faeries and humans be fearin' us, so let's pretend you're Thisbe and I'm a hot Pyramus”.