The character Puck, or Robin Goodfellow, is often associated with the mischievous little hobgoblin fairy in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Even before Shakespeare's portrayal of Puck, however, the little devil had been one of the most popular characters in English folklore. Puck appears to be a minor and rather annoying character with all his tricks and pranks in the play, but his role is necessary and even monumental. Shakespeare uses Puck as an intermediary in the play, connecting the play and the audience, the fairy world and the human world. Puck is also the only character in A Midsummer Night's Dream who addresses the audience directly, thus raising important questions about love, fairies, the lovers' self-image, and whether they are real or just a dream. plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essayPuck as a trickster has both a comedic and a darker role in the play. The origin of its various names exists in ancient languages, mostly with the original meaning of demon, devil or evil spirit, these names include "Puka in Old English, Puki in Old Norse, Puke in Swedish, Puge in Danish , Puks in Low German, Pukis in Latvia and Lithuania, (Edwards, 143)." Puck is responsible for mocking humans, "what fools these mortals are" (Shakespeare, 163) by doing mischievous deeds and causing much disorder in A Midsummer Night's Dream, but is ultimately portrayed as a good-natured and generous creature. A fairy in act two, scene one, describes Puck's devious pranks: Or art thou that sly and dishonest little goblin / Called Robin Goodfellow: art not he / That frightens the village maidens; / He skims the milk, and sometimes works in the mill, / And without boots he makes the housewife churn out of breath; / And sometimes let the drink show no hindrance; / Deceive the nocturnal wanderers who laugh at their evil? (Shakespeare, 156) Tricksters are often marginal characters because they are controlled by nature, rather than society. Puck's physical characteristics are described as animalistic and reflect the naturalistic instincts that control his actions. Even before Shakespeare, the character Puck was known as a "shape-shifter" who usually transformed into a horse, an eagle, a donkey, an old man, a brownie or a hobbit to perform his tricks: follow you; I'll lead you around / Through the swamp, through the bushes, through the bushes, through the brambles; / Sometimes I will be a horse, sometimes a hound / A pig, sometimes a headless bear; / And whinnies and barks and grunts and roars, and burns, / Like horse, hound, pig, bear, fire at every turn." (Shakespeare, 161) "Swindlers are considered primitive, naive, even ignorant... but a sometimes they possess a wisdom that others do not possess" (Wright, 4). Puck is responsible for turning Oberon's plan to make Demetrius fall in love with Helen into a disaster. Oberon ordered Puck to go into the woods and find the violet of thought, a flower that was supposedly struck by Cupid's arrow after accidentally missing Queen Elizabeth By dropping the pansy juice into Lysander's eyes instead of Demetrius's, Puck reveals his silly side, but also creates a dark and satirical question in the play (whether she knows it or not) regarding love between humans. When Hermia discovers that Lysander no longer loves her, she is struck by anger and bewilderment at how quickly love can happen. invert himself. In act five, scene one, after listening to the story of the young lovers, Teso gives his explanation by stating that: Lovers and foolsthey have brains so seething, / fantasies so molding that they understand / more than cold reason can ever comprehend / the madman, the lover and the poet / are of imagination all compact: / more devils are seen than the vast hell can contain ; / that is the madman: the lover all is frenetic, / sees Helen's beauty in an Egyptian brow: / the poet's eye, in a beautiful rolling frenzy / Looks from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven , / And, as the imagination takes shape / The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen / Transforms them into forms, and gives to the airy nothing / A local habitation and a name. / Such tricks have a strong imagination, / which, if it would but grasp a little joy, / would understand some bearer of that joy; / Or at night / Imagining some fear, / How easy is it for a bush to be considered a bear? (Shakespeare, 169) The problem created by Puck reveals the absurdity of love. Theseus compares the lover to the madman and the poet explaining that each of them does not see the world as it is, but constructs it through their own mind or imagination rather than reason. Puck not only connects the human world to the fairy world by rubbing the potion into the Athenian's eyes, he also interrupts Thisbe, Quince, and Pyramus while they rehearse their play and distances Lisader and Demetrius from each other so that they don't fight over Helen and Hermia. No other fairy in the play comes so close to the human world. Both the good and bad sides of Puck's nature are revealed in these two scenes. He takes great joy in scaring the actors in the forest, who are so overwhelmed by the sight of Bottom and Puck that they flee in fear of their lives. "O monstrous! O strange! We are haunted. Pray, masters! Fly, masters? Help!" (Shakespeare, 161). Although Puck finds the suffering of others amusing, he also has a soft heart. Rather than see Demetrius and Lysander fight each other over Hermia and Helena, he leads them astray and uses ventriloquism on them, to spread the love potion on their eyes and reunite them with their lovers, "Follow my voice, we try not manliness here” (Shakespeare, 166). Puck's mischief affects the fairies in negative and positive ways. Bringing the magic flower to Oberon so that he can turn Bottom into a donkey is a cruel and disgusting prank, but it helps restore the relationship between Oberon and Titania and reinforces the theme of "absurdity of love" in the play. In Elizabethan times, the male ass was proverbial for generous sexual actions, which makes Titania's love for Bottom even more comical. Earlier in the play Helena states that "vile and vile things, which contain no quantity, love can transpose into form and dignity. Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind, and is therefore a winged cupid painted by blind" (Shakespeare, 155) . This statement actually foreshadows the events of the play, which will reveal how love has the ability to die without warning and arise without reason. Bottom is incredulous when Titania appears to fall in love with him. He states, “Yet, to tell the truth, reason and love keep little company together these days” (Shakespeare, 161). Puck wants to see the world as it should be, or as it could be. By turning Bottom into a donkey and allowing Titania to fall in love with him, Shakespeare uses Puck to metaphorically present the audience with a dream world in which it is not out of the ordinary for a beautiful woman to fall in love with a hideous beast. .At the end of the show, Puck speaks directly to the audience. He is the only character in the play to do so, thus restoring his authority and reality over the other characters. Puck presents some curiously powerful statements in his speech, implying that the entire play was a dream and that the characters within it were merely "shadows." This atmosphereit is also created at the beginning of the play when Demetrius states upon awakening, "Are you sure that we are awake? It seems to me that yet we sleep, we dream" (Shakespeare, 168). Puck also implies that the show wasn't just a dream, but that the audience was actually dreaming during the show. The significance of using this idea is to challenge the audience to reflect on what they perceive as real and what is just a construction in the imagination. An interesting fact is that Puck finds and uses the most important symbol in the play, the pansy. . The meaning of pansy is "love in idleness", therefore, Puck is not rubbing the eyes of the Athenians with a real love potion, he is actually rubbing the idleness in their eyes. Knowing this, the entire work takes on a very satirical tone by defining love as vain, empty, and devoid of value or meaning. Puck notes in the play that only one male human in a million keeps his promises: “Then fate prevails, a man that holds a million fails, mistaking oath for oath” (Shakespeare, 163). It should be noted that it is the males in the play who fail to keep their promises, and they are also the ones quickly misled by Puck's misdeeds. Puck states that “Cupid is a dishonest boy, so as to drive poor women mad” (Shakespeare, 166). This statement places women on the suffering side of the love union, as Shakespeare could have easily replaced the word “females” with “humans.” Even though this play is a comedy at times, the dark undertones are exposed more and more as the show progresses. In his final speech, Puck uses a mysteriously disturbing tone that reflects the darkness that lies beneath the comedic surface of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Before Puck's speech, the fairies and humans had gathered to watch the ridiculous play of Pirumus and Thisbe, which Hippolita calls "The silliest stuff I ever heard" (Shakespeare, 170). The seriousness of Puck's speech is heightened because it directly follows this comic production. Puck states: Now the hungry lion roars, / And the wolf howls at the moon; / While the heavy plowman snores, / All abandoned to tired work. / Now the wasted embers shine, while the owl, scratching loudly, / Puts the wretch who lies in sorrow / In memory of a shroud. / Now is the time of night / That the tombs, all wide open / Everyone lets out his spirit, / To slide along the paths of the churches: / And we fairies, who run / Next to the team of the triple Hecate, / From there presence of the sun / Following the darkness like a dream, / Now they have fun; not a mouse / will disturb this holy house: / I have been sent ahead with the broom, to sweep the dust behind the door. (Shakespeare, 173) Puck seems to be talking about the degradation of human life. As night and darkness approach, the "graves are wide open," the "ploughman snores," and the "wretched man lies in distress." The idea presented here is that humans are considered real, but eventually grow old and die while fairies live in the imagination, and the imagination will never die. This forces the audience to reflect on what is more real, our dreams or reality as we know it. Shakespeare brought fame to Puck, who in mythology was known as two separate creatures, Puck and Robin Goodfellow. Shakespeare's Puck has since been reproduced in paintings by William Blake, Henry Fuseli, Sir Joshua Reynolds and even modern comic drawings. It has also been questioned whether Robin Hood was named after the fairy Robin Goodfellow. Both characters have a lot in common, they were known to give travelers a run for their money, Puck was a shape-shifter and Robin Hood was a master of disguise. Gillian Edwards notes that “The Goodfellow in the name of Robin 153-173