Friday Quiz: Shakespeare v. The Bible

First I find out I'm a closet Unitarian, and now I'm a student of the bible? I guess I have read the whole thing a bunch of times, in several different translations. Which, apparently, is more than average. I've gotta say though, that if I scored this high, I suspect that the bar is probably pretty low.

You know the Bible 75%!

 

Wow! You are truly a student of the Bible! Some of the questions were difficult, but they didn't slow you down! You know the books, the characters, the events . . . Very impressive!

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via L'Amour et le crane, formerly known as Ink and Incapability.

I've had the "If you could pick only one book to have stranded with you on a desert island what would you choose?" conversation several times lately. I got called a weinie for wanting some kind of scouting manual or one of those old hippie-survivalist 'how to build a shelter, purify water, find food, and heal the sick using only the contents of your handbag' type books. The kind with chord charts and lyrics for all the hippie folk songs in the back. Because of course I'd have a guitar with me, or could build one out of, like, bamboo or whatever. But no, my friend said, it had to be a work of literature. My argument that handbooks and folk music were literature was not purchased by my interlocutor.

Another friend of mine, an excellent writer, recently said that she'd pick the bible, on account of how it contains so many of what I guess you could call the foundational-type plot outlines that sort of define western literature. I don't disagree with her, not entirely, but if I've got to limit myself to literatary works, I'd probably stick with the complete works of old Will Shakespeare -- he's got all the same plots, but he's funnier. I'd want to bring an edition that includes the sonnets, though, in case I got tired of the plays. Check out that Shakespeare link, by the way; it goes to a site called Open Source Shakespeare, which is kind of cool.

Oh, and after you go there & brush up your Shakespeare, you can, if you like, go here and take a quiz. It's just a series of quotes to identify. I'm not clear about what my actual score is, but I got the response "Huzzah! You deserve most excellent accolades! A true Shakespearian Erudite!" Whatever an Erudite is. Watch out for the Chaucer they threw in there to try to trip you up. If you want more Shakespeare quizzes, there are plenty of 'em online. Watch out for the ones on about.com, though -- seriously annoying pop-ups and twitchy blinking items on the all the pages.

If you're looking for an online bible, this site has a whole bunch of English and non-English translations, and you can easily compare among them.