Wole Solinka is a dramatist, but he is from Nigeria, not the Caribbean. He is the first African recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, and his plays, which feature colonialism and African politics, include Death and the King’s Horsemen, Kongi’s Harvest, and A Dance of the Forests.

While Jean Rhys is a renowned writer, she is Dominican and not African. Moreover, she was known for writing novels (including Wide Sargasso Sea and After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie) and not plays.

This dramatist is Brecht, and his lifelong Marxist leanings were often visible in his aesthetics. His works include plays such as Mother Courage and Her Children, The Threepenny Opera, and Man Equals Man. He and his wife also co-founded and operated the Berliner Ensemble, an important post-war German theater company.

Only Tennessee Williams did not write absurdist plays emphasizing the meaninglessness of human existence. (The Theatre of the Absurd was a primarily European phenomenon, and Williams was American.)

Written by Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House concerns what the playwright considered to be the constricting aspects of marriage, motherhood, female domesticity, and public reputation versus private morality. The work is a tragedy and takes place in Ibsen’s native Norway in the late nineteenth century.

The author of this poem, Sir Walter Raleigh, was active during the Elizabethan Era and was a contemporary of William Shakespeare. He was imprisoned in the Tower of London by both Queen Elizabeth and King James I. He was eventually beheaded.

Passage adapted from "The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd" by Sir Walter Raleigh (1596)

This is English poet Edward Spenser’s unfinished epic The Faerie Queene (1590). It retells the Arthurian legend of the Redcrosse Knight and examines Christian virtues through allegory and conceit. The poem is distinguishable by its nine-line Spenserian stanzas, which follow an ABABBCBCC rhyme scheme, and by its incredible length – more than 2,000 stanzas.

Passage adapted from Book I of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590)

This poem was published in two installments in 1590 and in 1596. Even if you didn’t know this, Edmund Spenser only lived from the early 1550s to 1599, so there is only one tenable answer choice.

Passage adapted from Book I of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590)

Christopher Marlowe (c. 1564-1593) is a closer contemporary to Spenser (c. 1552-1599) than Jonson (1572-1637), Pepys (1633-1703), Dryden (1631-1700), or John Wilmot (1647-1680).

Passage adapted from Book I of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590)

The Faerie Queene praises the Tudors in general and Queen Elizabeth specifically (although by the end of its composition, Spenser was notably disillusioned with the monarchy), doing so through the form of a Christian allegory. Spenser received a substantial annual stipend from the queen as a result of this poem.

Passage adapted from Book I of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590)