STUDENTS were left in disbelief when a GCSE exam question on Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet asked them about the minor characters Gregory and Sampson.

The pair are servants of the House of Capulet – Juliet's family – who start a quarrel with Abram from Romeo's House of Montague, with Sampson uttering the famous line: "I will bite my thumb at them."

Today's exam featured a question on male aggression featuring the pair in the iconic play – and students were not impressed.

One wrote: "Pretty sure last time I checked the play was called Romeo and Juliet not Sampson and Gregory."

Another tweeted: "What I wrote was as irrelevant as Sampson and Gregory are to the play."

WHO ARE GREGORY AND SAMPSON?

Gregory and Sampson are Capulet servants in Romeo and Juliet

At the start of the play, Gregory is hesitant to start a fight with the Montagues, the Capulet's deadly rivals, but Sampson bites his thumb at Abram, who is a Montague.

The gesture is an insult –  "a disgrace to them, if they bear it" – and the Montagues retaliate. The fight sets the scene for the two warring factions Romeo and Juliet belong to.

Gregory also utters the famous line: "My naked weapon is out. Quarrel! I will back thee."

In the 1996 Baz Luhrmann film, the pair are switched over to the Montagues and are played by actors Jamie Kennedy and Zak Orth.

One student saw the funny side, saying: "I'm quite happy the paper was on Sampson and Gregory because last night I only read the first bit of the book the fall asleep."

Students complaining about bizarre or unfathomable questions have become a staple of the exam season.

MOST READ IN UK NEWS

Earlier this month a biology question asked why Charles Darwin was drawn as a monkey in a cartoon.

Thousands of teenagers took the paper, set by the AQA exam board, with many turning to social media afterwards to voice their exasperation.

One wrote on Twitter: "There's me revising homeostasis and the menstrual cycle when all I needed to know was why Charles Darwin was drawn as a monkey."

Another added: "So I went to school for 12 years to do a whole paper on plants and why Charles Darwin was drawn as a monkey.

"Very glad I revised hormones."

This year's question related to Victorian cartoonists lampooning Darwin for his then controversial claim that man was descended not from Adam and Eve but from apes.

A spokeswoman for AQA said: "It's completely normal for students to tweet about their exams. We only ever ask questions about things that are covered in the syllabus."

Source: Read Full Article