Tuesday being April Fool’s Day, other blogs will be telling jokes, pulling pranks, and testing your gullibility with fake news. But here on Brandywine Books, I want to edify you a wee bit with literary quizzes. I doubt regular readers will have difficulty with these, but maybe some passersby may find them challenging.
The question for my homemade quiz is simple. Which of the following statements or quotations are from the Bible (King James Version) and which are from Shakespeare’s plays?
1. “Dispute it like a man.”
2. Life is “a vapor, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away.”
3. “The evil that men do lives after them, The good is oft interred with their bones.”
4. “To whom will ye liken me, and make me equal, and compare me, that we may be like?”
5. “Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not.”
6. “Every subject’s duty is the king’s; but every subject’s soul is his own.”
7. “Delight is not seemly for a fool; much less for a servant to have rule over princes.”
8. “Had I but serv’d my God with half the zeal I serv’d my king, He would not in mine age have left me naked to mine enemies.”
9. “The trying of your faith worketh patience”
10. “Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.”
Bonus: Does the saying, “the blind leading the blind,” originate in the Bible, Shakespeare, or elsewhere?
Highlight these lines to check your answers: 1. Shakespeare’s Macbeth (IV,iii); 2. The Bible, James_4:14; 3. Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (III,ii); 4. The Bible, Isaiah_46:5; 5. The Bible, Matthew_2:18; 6. Shakespeare’s Henry V (IV.i); 7. The Bible, Proverbs_19:10 8. Shakespeare’s Henry VIII (III.ii); 9. The Bible, James_1:3; 10. The Bible, Matthew_5:5
Bonus: “Let them alone: they be blind leaders of the blind. And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch.” Matthew 15:14. This is probably the source of our English proverb because the Bible influenced our language more than anything else, but the idea may have been translated from an older source, according to this website (link).
That’s a clever way to hide the answers–I did okay…
Hmm, you can see the verse links still. That could give some of it away, even though these questions aren’t hard. Maybe I should remove those or change them so they won’t become links.
1, 3, 6, & 8 are Bill’s. The rest are Bible.