Easter Eggheads – a literary quiz

It’s Easter Bank Holiday so what better time for a quiz – questions are in rough chronological order of publication. I hope you’ll recognise our sacrifice here at Blogger Towers, where although our waistlines had decided against Easter eggs and Simnel cake we’ve now bought them purely for illustration purposes. I’ll post the answers next week, if anyone cares:

1. Who printed a story in which a “good wyf” from Southern England thought a merchant from the North was speaking French, because he asked for eggys which she knew as eyren?
2. Who shouts: “What, you egg! […] Young fry of treachery!” and what is he doing to whom as he shouts it?
3. Which Shakespearean hero shares his name with a famous egg dish?
4. Who rode westward on Good Friday 1613?
5. Who met Mephistopheles when on an Easter walk with Wagner?
6. At the beginning of which children’s story from 1854 is the King of Paflagonia so absorbed in a letter from the King of Crim Tartary “that he allows his eggs to get cold, and leaves his august muffins untasted“?
7. Which Victorian artist was described by his friend Charles Dickens as “sweet-tempered, humorous, conscientious, thoroughly good, and thoroughly beloved“?
8. What was the name of Raffles’ sidekick?
9. Who told Alice in Wonderland “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean“?
10. Which decadent hero lived in West Egg?
11. Which seminal moment in Irish history forms the subject matter for Sean O’Casey’s play “The Plough and the Stars”?
12. Who “came down to breakfast one morning, lifted the first cover he saw, said ‘Eggs! Eggs! Eggs! Damn all eggs!’ in an overwrought sort of voice, and instantly legged it for France, never to return to the bosom of his family?”
13. In which novel by Agatha Christie is there a character called Egg?
14. Who liked “a speckled brown egg from a French Marans hen, boiled for exactly three and a third minutes” for breakfast?
    

    
15. Which very sad black comedy originally starred Albert Finney and has been revived since with Clive Owen, Eddie Izzard and Miriam Margoyles among others in its cast?
16. When could you next hope to see the Oberammergau Passion Play?
17. What colour were Sam-I-am’s eggs?
18. Who wrote the original story and script for “The Long Good Friday”?
19. What hatched at the beginning of a story from an egg lying on a moonlit leaf?
20. Who made the assorted sweets from which if you were very unlucky, you might pick out a rotten egg flavoured one?

Happy Easter! Thank you to all those who commented on last week’s giveaways post. I’ve replied to the comments of the four who won a book or a critique. Please check your name there to see if you have won anything and how to claim it.

©Jessica Norrie 2017