Can You Guess the Lyrics of These ‘Hamilton’ Songs?

On August 6, 2015, Hamilton celebrated its Broadway opening at the Richard Rodgers Theatre. It wasn’t the world’s first exposure to the show: Creator and star Lin-Manuel Miranda had debuted preliminary versions of a dozen songs at Lincoln Center back in January 2012, and the musical premiered off-Broadway at the Public Theater in January 2015; official Broadway previews followed in July.

But opening night can be a make-or-break moment for a production. Needless to say, Hamilton soared, becoming one of the most defining pieces of 21st-century American pop culture (not to mention winning 11 Tony Awards and a Pulitzer Prize to boot). It’s based on Ron Chernow’s 2004 biography of Alexander Hamilton, and Miranda took advantage of hip-hop’s fast pace to pack as much historical detail as possible into the songs.

The original Broadway cast recording is nearly 2.5 hours long and features more than 20,000 words. To celebrate 10 years of Hamilton on Broadway, we’re testing how well you know them. The multiple-choice quiz below features partial stanzas from 10 Hamilton songs, each with a missing phrase: It’s your job to complete the lyrics.

To stay true to the meticulous rhythm and rhyme scheme of the songs, we’ve used the line breaks and other formatting from the libretto. But there are a few small lyrical discrepancies between the libretto and the original Broadway cast recording (e.g., an added conjunction, a deleted pronoun, I am versus I’m). In those cases, we stuck to what you hear on the cast album. 

After you take the quiz, dive into the real history behind some of Hamilton’s most memorable lyrics.

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