GRE Subject Test: Literature in English : Identification
Study concepts, example questions & explanations for GRE Subject Test: Literature in English
All GRE Subject Test: Literature in English Resources
Example Questions
Example Question #1 : Identification Of Plays
MEPHISTOPHELES: Within the bowels of these elements,
Where we are tortured and remain forever.
Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed
In one self place, for where we are is hell,
And where hell is must we ever be.
And, to conclude, when all the world dissolves,
And every creature shall be purified,
All places shall be hell that is not heaven.
Who is the author of this play?
Ben Jonson
Thomas Kyd
Christopher Marlowe
William Shakespeare
Samuel Johnson
Christopher Marlowe
These lines are taken from Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus (1604), a famous play based on the German legend of Faust. The excerpted lines are part of a well known monologue by Mephistopheles, the devil to whom Dr. Faustus sells his soul.
Example Question #4 : Identification Of British Plays
LORENZO: My lord, though Bel-imperia seeme thus coy,
Let reason holde you in your wonted ioy:
In time the sauage bull sustaines the yoake,
In time all haggard hawkes will stoope to lure,
In time small wedges cleaue the hardest oake,
In time the [hardest] flint is pearst with softest shower;
And she in time will fall from her disdaine,
And rue the sufferance of your freendly paine.
Who is the author of this play?
Christopher Marlowe
Ben Jonson
Samuel Johnson
Thomas Kyd
William Shakespeare
Thomas Kyd
In Thomas Kyd’s play The Spanish Tragedie (1587) is an example of a new type of Elizabethan play: the revenge play. The work, a bloody tragedy set in Portugal and Spain, features the characters Hieronimo, Bel-imperia, Lorenzo, Balthazar, and Horatio. Some elements from this work (most notably the ghosts and the play-within-a-play structure) appear later in the more famous Hamlet, and T.S. Eliot alludes to the play in his poem, The Waste Land.
Adapted from The Spanish Tragedie by Thomas Kyd, 2.ii.1–8
Example Question #11 : Identification Of British Plays
Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench'd our steeples, drown'd the cocks!
You sulph'rous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Strike flat the thick rotundity o' th' world,
Crack Nature's moulds, all germains spill at once,
That makes ingrateful man!
The above lines are taken from which Shakespearean play?
Hamlet
Othello
King Lear
A Winter’s Tale
Titus Andronicus
King Lear
This well-known monologue is from King Lear (1606), one of Shakespeare’s most famous tragedies. Over the course of the drama, the eponymous king grows steadily more insane after casting out his most loving daughter, Cordelia, based on the advice of his other two children. The play is especially renowned for its nuanced depiction of human suffering, madness, and familial bonds.
Example Question #12 : Identification Of British Plays
What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,
That he should weep for her? What would he do,
Had he the motive and the cue for passion
That I have? He would drown the stage with tears
And cleave the general ear with horrid speech,
Make mad the guilty and appal the free,
Confound the ignorant, and amaze indeed
The very faculties of eyes and ears. Yet I,
A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak,
Like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause,
And can say nothing. No, not for a king,
Upon whose property and most dear life
A damned defeat was made. Am I a coward?
Who calls me villain?
From which Shakespeare play is this monologue taken?
Romeo and Juliet
A Midsummer Night's Dream
Macbeth
Hamlet
King Lear
Hamlet
Although not as famous as the “To be or not to be” monologue, this excerpt is one of Hamlet’s better known soliloquies from the eponymous play. In it, he agonizes about the correct course of action to avenge his dead father, the former king of Denmark.
Adapted from The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark by William Shakespeare II.ii.1632-1646 (1603)
Example Question #13 : Identification Of British Plays
This play's title is taken from a line in Shelley's poem "To a Skylark."
Long Day’s Journey into Night by Eugene O'Neill
Blithe Spirit by Noel Coward
The Royal Hunt of the Sun by Peter Shaffer
Night Must Fall by Emlyn Williams
Love on the Dole by Ronald Gow
Blithe Spirit by Noel Coward
The title of Noel Coward's 1941 comic play, Blithe Spirit, is taken from a the first line of Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem "To a Skylark":
Example Question #132 : Identification
What play centers on two hit-men, Ben and Gus, who are awaiting their next assignment in a windowless basement?
The Balcony by Jean Genet
Endgame by Samuel Beckett
No Exit by Jean-Paul-Sartre
The Dumb Waiter by Harold Pinter
Underground Lovers by Jean Tardieu
The Dumb Waiter by Harold Pinter
This overview describes the one-act play The Dumb Waiter by Harold Pinter.
Example Question #14 : Identification Of Plays
This play switches back and forth between the year 1809 and the present. Some of the main characters include Thomasina Coverly, Septimus Hodge, Hannah Jarvis, and Bernard Nightingale.
Arcadia by Tom Stoppard
Ashes to Ashes by Harold Pinter
Chips with Everything by Arnold Wesker
Translations by Brian Friel
Narrow Road to the Deep North by Edward Bond
Arcadia by Tom Stoppard
This is a brief overview of Arcadia by Tom Stoppard, a play first performed in 1993.
Example Question #134 : Identification
The Common Man, Sir Thomas More, and Thomas Cromwell are characters in which of the following plays?
The Way of the World by William Congreve
Arcadia by Tom Stoppard
Long Day’s Journey Into Night by Eugene O’Neill
A Man for All Seasons by Robert Bolt
The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
A Man for All Seasons by Robert Bolt
The Common Man, Sir Thomas More, and Thomas Cromwell are characters from the 1960 play A Man for All Seasons by Robert Bolt. The play follows the life of Sir Thomas More, the sixteenth-century Chancellor of England—a "man of conscience."
Example Question #135 : Identification
Anthonio Salieri, Constanze Weber, and Emperor Joseph II are characters from which of the following plays?
The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde
Blithe Spirit by Noel Coward
Saint Joan by George Bernard Shaw
Amadeus by Peter Shaffer
Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw
Amadeus by Peter Shaffer
Anthonio Salieri, Constanze Weber, and Emperor Joseph II are characters in Peter Shaffer's 1979 play Amadeus, which creates a fictionalized plot centering on composers, Amadeus Mozart and Antonio Salieri. The play is based on the 1830 play by Alexander Pushkin, Mozart and Salieri.
Example Question #136 : Identification
Which of the following is an absurdist, existentialist play that focuses on characters from a Shakespearian tragedy?
A Man for All Seasons by Robert Bolt
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard
The Homecoming by Harold Pinter
Waiting for Godot by Samuel Becket
The Zoo Story by Edward Albee
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard
This brief overview describes Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, first performed in 1966. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are minor characters from Shakespeare's Hamlet who are presumably killed off-stage over the course of the play.
All GRE Subject Test: Literature in English Resources
