The Bard's Birthday Quiz

Think you know Shakespeare? Think you know what famous philosophers would say about Shakespeare?

Centuries after Shakespeare first put quill to paper, his plays continue to provoke philosophical questions that run the gamut from sexual ethics to narrative form. In 2009 Comp Lit professor, Paul Kottman, pulled together a series of philosophical reflections on Shakespeare's plays from such preeminent and diverse thinkers as Marx, Derrida, and Hegel. These essays, gathered in Kottman's book, Philosophers On Shakespeare, show the staggering range of inquiry that the Bard's corpus presents readers. In honor of his 450th birthday, we've cobbled together a quiz based on Kottman's book to test your knowledge of both Shakespeare and some prominent philosophical personalities.

Philosophers On Shakespeare: A Quiz

• Which philosopher noted that Shakespeare “excellently depicts the real nature of money”?
• Karl Marx
• Jacques Derrida
• Walter Benjamin
• Which philosopher argues that, in the tragedy of Hamlet, “existence is denied, together with its blazing reflection in the gods or in an immortal afterlife"?
• Georg Lukács
• Friedrich Nietzsche
• Jacques Derrida

Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt both characterize Hamlet as fitting into which tragic German genre?

• Bildungsroman
• Trauerspiel
• Schadenfreude

Which philosopher, concerned with names and identities, describes Juliet’s plea that Romeo forsake his name as a "double bind"?

• Walter Benjamin
• Friedrich Nietzsche
• Jacques Derrida

Which philosopher, for whom the concept of freedom was a frequent preoccupation, maintains that the tragic actions of plays such as Macbeth and King Lear are tragic because of the characters' individual freedom?

• Carl Schmitt
• Friedrich Nietzsche
• H.W.F. Hegel