Revenge Trivia Quiz

Answer: Clytemnestra

The first of the three tragedies that compose Aeschylus' trilogy "Oresteia", "Agamemnon" (written around the mid-6th century BC) focuses on the titular character's homecoming from the Trojan War. Agamemnon, king of Argos and Mycenae and supreme leader of the Greeks, returns home after ten years with his new concubine Cassandra, a Trojan princess and priestess of Apollo. His queen Clytemnestra, however, has been nursing a grudge against her husband since the beginning of the war because of his sacrifice of their daughter, Iphigenia, who was killed to appease the goddess Artemis and allow the Greek fleet to reach Troy. During Agamemnon's absence she has taken her husband's cousin, Aegisthus, as a lover, and with him has planned Agamemnon's murder. Aegisthus is also pursuing his own revenge against the king, whose father Atreus usurped his brother Thyestes' throne and killed two of his sons, feeding their bodies to their father. Cassandra, a prophetess, sees her death and Agamemnon's, but no one heeds her. Clytemnestra murders both in the bath, and then proudly stands beside Aegisthus, with whom she claims power over the city.

"Agamemnon" has a stripped-down cast of characters, with the chorus - as customary in Ancient Greek drama - providing a running commentary on the action. In this case, the members of the chorus are a group of elders of the city, faithful to Agamemnon. The whole trilogy revolves around the themes of revenge and justice. In the second part, "The Libation Bearers", Orestes, Agamemnon and Clytemnestra's son, avenges his father's death by killing his mother and Aegisthus. Plagued by a curse due to the heinous crimes committed by its members, the House of Atreus is caught in a seemingly endless cycle of bloody vengeance - which is broken in the trilogy's final part, "The Eumenides".

Medea and Hecuba also wreak bloody vengeance on men who wronged them in the two tragedies by Euripides that bear their names.

Answer: Nibelungenlied

Though partly reflecting the ideals of chivalry of the High Middle Ages, the Middle High German "Nibelungenlied" ("Song of the Nibelungs") is based on a number of heroic poems in the Old Norse "Poetic Edda", probably dating from the 9th or 10th century, before the peoples of those northern lands embraced Christianity. Those poems were also the main inspiration for Richard Wagner's "Ring Cycle". The name "Nibelungs" denotes the royal house of the Burgundians, a Germanic tribe that in the 5th century AD established a kingdom on the left bank of the Rhine, whose capital was the present-day city of Worms.

The first half of the poem focuses on the hero Siegfried's courtship of the beautiful Kriemhild, the sister of the three Burgundian kings, and his murder at the hands of their faithful vassal Hagen after a dispute between Kriemhild and Brünhild, the wife of Gunther, the eldest of the three kings. Devastated by her loss, and cheated of Siegfried's treasure by Hagen, Kriemhild swears vengeance, and after 13 years marries Etzel (Attila), King of the Huns. When a son is born to the couple, Kriemhild invites her brothers and their retinue to a baptismal feast in their castle in Hungary. In the ensuing bloodbath, most of the poem's key characters die: Kriemhild achieves her vengeance against Hagen and her brothers, but loses her baby son first, and then her own life.

A major theme in most epic poetry, revenge makes its appearance in all the works listed as incorrect answers. "La Morte d'Arthur" by Thomas Malory, however, was written in prose.

Answer: Titus Andronicus

Though quite a few of Shakespeare's major works boast a rather impressive body count, none of them reach the heights (or lows?) of "Titus Andronicus". Written between 1588 and 1593, this play is the Bard's first tragedy - in which he tried his hand at emulating the bloody revenge tragedies that had become extremely popular with theatre-going audiences in the late Elizabethan era. If "Hamlet" (written only a few years later), in spite of its plethora of violent deaths, is a literary masterpiece with a sophisticated philosophical subtext, "Titus Andronicus" may be viewed as the Elizabethan version of modern pulp fiction.

Set in a vaguely defined 4th century AD, "Titus Andronicus" is not based on any actual historical characters or events. The over-the-top violence of the story caused the play to be consistently denigrated by critics for the best part of three centuries. The eponymous character, a victorious Roman general, finds himself embroiled in a terrifying cicle of revenge after his return from a military campaign with five prisoners - Tamora, queen of the Goths, her three sons, and her lover, the Moor Aaron. When Titus sacrifices Tamora's eldest son to avenge the death of 21 of his sons during the war, the bodies start dropping - reaching the staggering count of 14 before the end of the play. This orgy of blood includes rape, mutilation, madness, and cannibalism - most of which happen on stage, in the tradition of Seneca's tragedies, the most influential source of inspiration for authors of revenge dramas.

Other notable examples of revenge tragedies are Thomas Kyd's "The Spanish Tragedy" (c. 1587), Christopher Marlowe's "The Jew of Malta" (1592), Cyril Tourneur's "The Atheist's Tragedy" (1611), and John Webster's "The White Devil" (1612) and "The Duchess of Malfi" (c. 1613).

Answer: Victor Hugo

First performed in 1832, "Le roi s'amuse" (literally "The King Has Fun", though English translations bear different titles, such as "The King's Diversion") is one of Victor Hugo's early plays, written when he was not yet 30 years old. The play is based on a real historical character, Nicolas Ferrial (known as Triboulet), who was court jester for French kings Louis XII and Francis I in the 16th century. "Le roi s'amuse" was banned for over 50 years after its premiere because of alleged disparaging references to King Louis-Philippe.

In the play, the deformed Triboulet aids and abets his king Francis I - a notorious womanizer - in his conquests. Because of this he is cursed by a nobleman whose daughter has been seduced by the king. When Triboulet's own daughter, Blanche - whom he has tried in vain to keep hidden - is targeted by the king, the jester plans to avenge himself on his sovereign by having him murdered by a hired killer. Unfortunately, his plan backfires when Blanche sacrifices herself to save the king's life. Giuseppe Verdi's opera (1851) closely follows the plot of Hugo's play, though both the setting and the names are changed: Triboulet becomes Rigoletto, the king is the Duke of Mantua, and the ill-fated Blanche is named Gilda. The aria in which Rigoletto vows revenge against the Duke ("Sì! Vendetta, tremenda vendetta!") is one of the opera's most famous.

Victor Hugo's works have inspired over 1,000 musical compositions. Besides "Rigoletto", the best-known of them are the musical theatre adaptations of "Les Misérables" (1980) and "Notre-Dame de Paris" ("The Hunchback of Notre-Dame", 1998).

Answer: Corsica

A contemporary of Victor Hugo, Prosper Mérimée was one of the pioneers of the novella - a work of fiction longer than a short story, but shorter than a novel. Indeed, all of his three best-known works - "The Venus of Ille" (1835), "Colomba" (1840), and "Carmen" (1845) - are novellas, narrated with remarkable economy of words and action, yet full of vivid, often tragic events.

Like Mérimée's first published novella, "Mateo Falcone" (1829), "Colomba" is set in Corsica, which he visited for the first time in 1839. The visit made a strong impression on the author: on that occasion he met a middle-aged woman named Colomba Carabelli, who had been involved in an episode of vendetta (revenge) against a rival family. Indeed, in spite of her name (meaning "dove" in Italian), Mérimée's Colomba Della Rebbia is anything but peaceful. Haunted by her father's murder at the hands of their sworn enemies, the men of the Barricini family, she urges her brother Orso, a former lieutenant in Napoleon's Imperial Guard, to take his revenge as head of the family. Orso, however, has been away from Corsica since his teenage years, and his modern values contrast with the more primitive mindset of his passionate, iron-willed sister.

The grim, tense atmosphere of Orso and Colomba's home town of Pietranera and the inevitable escalation of violence is relieved by Orso's budding romance with Miss Lydia Nevil, whom the young man meets on the boat to Corsica on which she and her father, an Irish colonel, are traveling. The beautiful, bloodthirsty Colomba is an unforgettable character, and the untamed nature of Corsica's interior comes alive in Mérimée's lovingly detailed description.

Answer: he finds a fabulous treasure

Published in 1846, "The Count of Monte Cristo" ("Le Comte de Monte-Cristo") is Alexandre Dumas père's best-known work of fiction together with "The Three Musketeers", and one of adventure fiction's undisputed classics. The novel, co-written by Dumas and his collaborator Auguste Maquet, is a re-elaboration of a much shorter novel written a few years earlier, partly based on a true story Dumas had read about in a memoir from an archivist of the Paris police.

Betrayed by a jealous crewmate, 19-year-old sailor Edmond Dantès is arrested for treason, and imprisoned in the impregnable Chateau d'If, a fortress located on an island off the coast of southern France. A chance meeting with a fellow prisoner, Italian priest Abbé Faria (based on a real historical character), saves him from a deep depression, and eventually turns things around for him when the Abbé reveals to him the hiding place of a vast treasure buried on the island of Monte Cristo. Twenty-four years after his imprisonment, Edmond - now the Count of Monte Cristo - returns to Paris to wreak his vengeance on those who have caused him to spend 14 years in prison. Though most of his enemies receive their deserved punishment, at the end of the novel Edmond grows weary of the endless cycle of vengeance, and finds peace by leaving everything behind.

The theme of revenge is also present in "The Three Musketeers" (1844) - embodied by the villainous Milady de Winter - and its sequel "Twenty Years After" (1845), in which Milady's son tries to avenge his mother.

Answer: Wuthering Heights

In spite of its reputation as a "romantic" novel, Emily Brontë's "Wuthering Heights" (1847) is at its heart a quintessential tale of revenge. Not surprisingly, it proved quite controversial at the time of publishing, due to the challenges to the Victorian morality posed by its stark depiction of domestic abuse and other kinds of physical and mental cruelty. Its central character, the mysterious foundling Heathcliff, has often been labelled as the ultimate Byronic hero, dominated by destructive passions and single-mindedly bent on revenge on those who disparaged and humiliated him. Set on the bleak, windswept Yorkshire moors, the novel also features elements of the popular Victorian genre of the ghost story, and is told mostly in flashbacks held together by a frame story.

Adopted by the charitable Mr Earnshaw, Heathcliff is mercilessly bullied by the latter's son, Hindley, while growing close to Hindley's sister, Catherine. The pair's thwarted love affair brings about a string of disasters, including Catherine's death in childbirth and Heathcliff's ill-fated marriage to Isabella, the sister of Edgar Linton, Catherine's husband. After nearly causing the ruin of the Earnshaw and Linton families, Heathcliff - unhinged by anger and hatred, and haunted by Catherine's ghost - lets himself die, leaving Catherine's daughter and Hindley's son to build a life together from the ashes of the past.

In "Jane Eyre" (1847), written by Emily's sister, Charlotte Brontë, the element of revenge is also present - though not as prominently as in "Wuthering Heights" - especially in the character of Mr Rochester's imprisoned wife, who kills herself while trying to avenge herself on the husband who kept her locked away for years.

Answer: Captain Nemo

The central character of Jules Verne's adventure novels "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas" ("Vingt mille lieues sous les mers", 1869-1870) and "The Mysterious Island"("L'ĩle mysterieuse", 1875), Captain Nemo is the alias of Prince Dakkar, the son of an Indian rajah. In the first book, however, his true identity remains shrouded in mystery. Captain Nemo is described as a highly educated man, a polyglot and a scientific genius, deeply involved in the fight against imperialism. His alias, meaning "no one", was probably inspired by the episode in Homer's "Odyssey" in which Odysseus tricks the cyclops Polyphemus by telling him his name is "no one".

In "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea", Captain Nemo captures Professor Pierre Aronnax and his companions, Conseil and Ned Land, and brings them on board his electrically-powered submarine, the Nautilus. The captain's vengeful intent is hinted at first when the submarine visits the wreck of a ship named the "Vengeur" ("Avenger"), and then fully revealed in the book's gripping climax: attacked by a warship of a mysterious nation, the Nautilus sinks it by ramming it below the waterline. His act of revenge accomplished, the captain - described by narrator Aronnax as an "archangel of hatred" - kneels before the portrait of a young woman with two children, and bursts into tears. Though the Nautilus is apparently swallowed by a whirlpool at the end of the novel, Nemo resurfaces 16 years later in "The Mysterious Island", where he reveals his identity and his motivations just before his death.

Both Captain Ahab (in Herman Melville's "Moby-Dick") and Captain Hook (in J.M. Barrie's "Peter Pan") are characters seeking revenge against some wrongdoing. This is not, however, the case of Captain Blood, the hero of Rafael Sabatini's adventure novel of the same title.

Answer: Anna Karenina

The Biblical quote used by Leo Tolstoy as the epigraph to "Anna Karenina" (1878) originally comes from the book of Deuteronomy (32:35), though it also appears - in a rather different context - in Romans 12:19. The presence of such an epigraph creates a sense of tension in the reader, who expects vengeance to be one of the novel's major themes. In fact, though themes of revenge and retribution appear throughout "Anna Karenina", their role is somewhat more nuanced.

The epigraph's relevance to the novel's intricate plot has been debated by critics ever since the novel's publication. When Anna's much older husband, Alexei Karenin, learns of his wife's affair with Count Vronsky, he is seized by a strong desire for revenge, wanting to see Anna suffer. However, when she almost dies in childbirth, he forgives her - though denying her request for a divorce, which eventually leads to the novel's tragic outcome. Anna's suicide, driven by anger and jealousy, has been interpreted by various critics as an act of vengeance towards Vronsky - or as God taking revenge on her for her sin of adultery. The social ostracism to which Anna is subjected because of her relationship with Vronsky (who is not equally shunned) has also been read as Russian society's revenge for her transgression.

Revenge is also an important theme in Dostoevsky's "The Brothers Karamazov" and "Crime and Punishment", though not so much in Tolstoy's other major novel, "War and Peace".

Answer: Emilio Salgari

In his writing career, tragically cut short by suicide in 1911, Emilio Salgari authored over 200 adventure novels, many of them set in exotic locales such as India, Southeast Asia, and the Caribbean Sea. His extensive body of work has been translated in many languages, and his books are now viewed as classics of adventure fiction, widely enjoyed around the world by both children and adults. Outside Italy, Salgari's works are especially popular in Spain, Portugal and Latin America, while only a few of them have been translated into English.

Salgari's longest and most popular series are the cycle of the Tigers of Malaysia, set in India and Southeast Asia in the mid-19th century, and the cycle of the Corsairs of the Antilles, set in the Caribbean during the Golden Age of Piracy (17th century). Salgari's heroes and heroines are passionate, headstrong, and courageous to the point of recklessness - the women no less than the men. The heroes of both the Malaysian and the Caribbean cycle are handsome, charismatic noblemen seeking revenge for the loss of their family. A Bornean prince whose whole family has been slaughtered by the English, Sandokan becomes a feared pirate, roaming the seas of the Indonesian archipelago and preying on European ships. The Black Corsair, on the other hand, is an Italian nobleman who has lost three brothers to the treasonous acts of a Flemish duke. Though revenge against traitors and usurpers motivates most of these two characters' actions, both of their stories take an unexpected turn when love intrudes upon their single-minded determination.

The Malaysian cycle comprises 11 books, while the Caribbean cycle comprises five. In both cycles a number of historical characters make their appearance - such as James Brooke, the White Rajah of Sarawak, and Welsh privateer Sir Henry Morgan.