Identification of British Plays After 1925 - GRE Subject Test: Literature in English

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Question

Which of the following is an absurdist, existentialist play that focuses on characters from a Shakespearian tragedy?

Answer

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.

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Question

Anthonio Salieri, Constanze Weber, and Emperor Joseph II are characters from which of the following plays?

Answer

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.

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Question

The Common Man, Sir Thomas More, and Thomas Cromwell are characters in which of the following plays?

Answer

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."

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Question

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.

Answer

This is a brief overview of Arcadia by Tom Stoppard, a play first performed in 1993.

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Question

What play centers on two hit-men, Ben and Gus, who are awaiting their next assignment in a windowless basement?

Answer

This overview describes the one-act play The Dumb Waiter by Harold Pinter.

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Question

This play's title is taken from a line in Shelley's poem "To a Skylark."

Answer

The title ofNoel Coward's 1941 comic play, Blithe Spirit, is taken from a the first line of Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem "To a Skylark":

"Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!

Bird thou never wert,

That from Heaven, or near it,

Pourest thy full heart

In profuse strains of unpremeditated art."

The play itself focuses on novelist Charles Condomine and medium Madame Arcati's failed attempt to conduct a seance.

Passage adapted from "To a Skylark" l.1-5 by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1820)

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