Shakespeare's Sonnets Trivia Quiz

Answer: Sugared

"The witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous & honey-tongued Shakespeare, witness his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugared sonnets among his private friends, &c." Meres' work also cites several of Shakespeare's plays, which has helped in dating them.

It is unknown how Meres, an obscure cleric living in Rutland, would have learned about the sonnets. No connection has ever been found linking him to Shakespeare.

Answer: The Passionate Pilgrim

"The Passionate Pilgrim" was published in 1599 by William Jaggard, and on the title page it says by "W. Shakespeare." It contains some 20 poems, only some of them actually by Shakespeare, including Sonnets 138 and 144, and some passages taken from Shakespeare's plays. Poems by Richard Barnfield, Bartholomew Griffin, Thomas Deloney, Christopher Marlowe, and Sir Walter Raleigh appear in the book; scholars are fairly certain that many others were not written by Shakespeare, but the authorship of these is either unknown or disputed.

It appears that by 1599 Shakespeare's name was already well-known enough to serve as a marketing tool.

Answer: 154

The book contains 154 sonnets, plus a 47-line poem called "A Lover's Complaint," which may or may not have been written by Shakespeare. Why this poem was included is not clear. It is written in an uncommon form called "Rhyme Royal." There is still a great deal of controversy among scholars about this poem, some accepting it as an authentic work by Shakespeare, and others alleging it is the work of someone else. One alternative author often mentioned is a man named John Davies.

Answer: It implies that the author is dead

The phrase "ever-living poet" was a common one used in many dedications during Elizabethan and Jacobean times. It was used almost exclusively to refer to writers who were dead at the time their works were published; only one other example has been found where it was used in reference to a living writer. Shakespeare, of course, was very much alive in 1609.

Another puzzle is the identity of "Mr. W.H." Many candidates have been proposed, but there is no consensus about who he was.

Answer: No

Sonnet 126 ("O thou, my lovely boy, who in thy power") is not a sonnet at all, but a series of six couplets. Sonnet 145 ("Those lips that Love's own hand did make") is not written in iambic pentameter, but in iambic tetrameter. There are some minor variations in other poems; most of them are attributable to changes in pronunciation from Shakespeare's time to the modern day.

Answer: The Dark Lady

Many of the sonnets 127 through 154 are addressed to a mysterious woman known as "The Dark Lady." Her name is derived from Sonnet 130, one of the most famous, which begins: "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun / Coral is far more red than her lips' red / If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun; / If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head." Hardly a year goes by that someone does not announce that he or she has identified "The Dark Lady," but there is no credible evidence for her identity at all.

Answer: The Rival Poet

Consider these lines from Sonnet 79: "Whilst I alone did call upon thy aid, / My verse alone had all thy gentle grace; / But now my gracious numbers are decayed, / And my sick Muse doth give an other place." Shakespeare both admires and fears "The Rival Poet." As with "The Dark Lady," many candidates have been put forward as "The Rival Poet." Perhaps the most likely is George Chapman, who is famous for his translations of the works of Homer.

Answer: None of the events can be connected to Shakespeare's life

While Shakespeare's life is very poorly documented, the events described in the sonnets do not appear to correlate with what we do know. There is nothing, for example, that would explain Sonnet 29: "When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes / I all alone beweep my outcast state, / And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries, / And look upon myself, and curse my fate." While some have claimed to find biographical evidence in a few of the sonnets, taken as a whole they do not appear to be an accurate record of Shakespeare's life.

This has led some to declare that the sonnets are not autobiographical at all, but merely an "intellectual exercise."

Answer: Christopher Marlowe

A growing number of people are questioning Shakespeare's authorship of the works attributed to him. Those who propose Christopher Marlowe as the true author are called Marlovians. Christopher Marlowe (1564 - 1593) was more famous than Shakespeare during his lifetime.

It was he who made blank verse the medium of English theatre, and he was also a famous poet. His plays are almost indistinguishable from the early works of Shakespeare. Marlowe was supposedly killed, stabbed above the right eye, in an argument over the bill, or reckoning, in a private home on May 30, 1593 - not a tavern as is often reported.

At the time of his death, he was under indictment for the capital offense of heresy and atheism. The official report of his death leaves many questions unanswered, and many people believe that his death was faked, and the body of a Puritan preacher named John Penry was substituted for his at his inquest. Wraight argues that Marlowe lived out his life in exile under an assumed name, and wrote the works attributed to Shakespeare. Before you dismiss this out of hand, consider Sonnet 74: "So then thou hast but lost the dregs of life, / The prey of worms, my body being dead; / The coward conquest of a wretch's knife, / Too base of thee to be remembered." Wraight makes a compelling case that when the sonnets are arranged in the correct order, they tell a coherent tale of a poet forced into a life of exile and anonymity, while another man takes credit for his work.

Answer: No

There are very few surviving copies of Thorpe's edition of "Shake-Speares Sonnets" - so few, in fact, that many people believe that someone of influence suppressed the work and had it recalled. Who this was and what his motives may have been are a matter of conjecture. "Shake-Speares Sonnets" was not reprinted until 1640.