The character of Puck, or Robin Goodfellow, is most often associated with the mischievous little hobgoblin fairy from A Midsummer Night's Dream by Shakespeare. Even before Shakespeare's interpretation of Puck, the little leprechaun was one of the most popular characters in English folklore. Puck seems like 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 speaks directly to the audience, thus raising important questions about the play regarding love, fairies, the images that lovers have of themselves- same and if they are real or just a dream. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Puck as a trickster has both a comedic and a darker role in the play. The origin of its different names exists in ancient languages, mainly 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 performing mischievous acts 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, the first scene describes Puck's devious pranks: Or else you are that cunning and deceitful pixie / Called Robin Goodfellow: are you not he / Who frightens the village maidens; / Skimmed milk, and sometimes work in the quern, / And without a boot the housewife churns out of breath; / And sometimes make the drink bear no drink; / Mislead the night wanderers by laughing 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 those of an animal and reflect the naturalistic instincts that control his actions. Even before Shakespeare, the character of 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: I will follow you; I'll lead you around / Through the bog through the bush through the brake through the heather; / Sometimes I will be a horse, sometimes a dog / A pig, a headless bear, sometimes a fire; / And neigh, bark, growl, roar and burn, / Like a horse, a dog, a pig, a bear, fire every moment. » (Shakespeare, 161) "Tricksters are considered primitive, naive, even ignorant... but sometimes they possess a wisdom that others do not have" (Wright, 4). Puck is responsible for the transformation of the plan of Oberon aiming to make Demetrius fall in love with Helena in disaster Oberon ordered Puck to go into the woods and find the pansy, a flower which was supposedly hit by Cupid's arrow after accidentally missing the queen. Elizabeth By dropping the juice of thought into Lysender's eyes instead of Demetrius's, Puck reveals his foolish side, but he also creates a dark, satirical question in the play (whether he knows it or not). no) concerning love between humans When Hermia discovers that Lysander no longer loves her, she is struck with anger and perplexity at the speed with which love can be reversed in the act.five, scene one, upon hearing the story of the young lovers, Thesus gives his explanation. declaring that: Lovers and madmen have such bubbling brains, / such formative fantasies which apprehend / more than cold reason ever understands / the madman, the lover and the poet / are all compact in imagination: / we sees more devils than the vast hell can contain; / here is the madman: the lover everything is frenzied, / sees the beauty of Helen in an Egyptian forehead: / the eye of the poet, in a beautiful frenzy, rolls / He looks from heaven to earth, from earth to sky, / And, while imagination forms / The forms of unknown things, the poet's pen / Transforms them into forms and gives to aerial nothingness / A local habitation and a name. / Such tricks have a strong imagination, / That, if only she would apprehend some joy, / She understands one who brings that joy; / Or in the night / Imagining some fear, / How easily is a bush supposed to be a bear? (Shakespeare, 169) The problem Puck creates reveals the absurdity of love. Theseus compares the lover to the madman and the poet, explaining that each does not see the world as it is, but constructs it through his own mind or imagination rather than through reason. Puck not only connects the human world to the fairy world by rubbing the potion on the Athenian's eyes, he also interrupts Thisbe, Quince and Pyramus rehearsing their play and he pushes Lysader and Demetrius away from each other so that they don't fight over Helen and Hermia. No other fairy in the room is this close to the human world. The evil and good side of Puck's nature is revealed in these two scenes. He takes great joy in frightening the forest actors, who are so upset by the sight of Bottom and Puck that they run, fearing for their lives. "O monstrous! O strange! We are haunted. Pray, masters! Flying masters? Help!" (Shakespeare, 161). Although Puck finds humor in the misfortune of others, he also has a soft heart. Rather than seeing Demetrius and Lysander fight for Hermia and Helena, he leads them astray and uses ventriloquism on them, in order to pour the love potion on their eyes and reunite them with their lovers: "Follow my voice, we will do not attempt manliness here” (Shakespeare, 166). Puck's misdeeds affect the fairies in both negative and positive ways. Bringing the magic flower to Oberon so he can turn Bottom into a donkey is a cruel and nasty joke, but it helps restore the relationship between Oberon and Titania and reinforces the theme of "the absurdity of love" in the play . In Elizabethan times, the male donkey was proverbial for his generous sexual actions, which makes Titania's love for Bottom even more comical. Earlier in the play, Helena states “things low and vile, containing no quantity, love can be transposed into form and dignity.” Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind, and is therefore a winged Cupid painted blind” (Shakespeare, 155). . This statement truly 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: “And yet, to tell the truth, reason and love keep no company 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 unusual for a beautiful woman to fall in love with a hideous beast. .At the end of the play, Puck speaks directly to the audience. He is the only character in the play to do this, thus reestablishing hisauthority and its reality over other characters. Puck makes some curiously powerful statements in his speech, which imply that the entire play was a dream and that the characters in it were only "shadows." This atmosphere is also created earlier in the play when Demetrius states upon waking, "Are you sure we are awake?" It seems to me that yet we sleep, we dream” (Shakespeare, 168). Puck also implies that the play was not just a dream, but that the audience was actually dreaming during the performance. The importance of using this idea is to make the audience think about what they perceive as real and what is just a construct in the imagination. An interesting fact is that Puck finds and uses the most important symbol in the play, thought. . The meaning of thought is "love in idleness", so Puck is not rubbing the Athenians' eyes with an actual love potion, he is actually rubbing idleness into them. Knowing this, the whole piece takes on a very satirical tone defining love as vain, empty and without value or meaning. Puck remarks in the play that only one man in a million keeps his promises: “Then fate prevails, a man who holds a million fails, confusing oath for oath” (Shakespeare, 163). It is notable that it is the men in the play who fail to keep their promises, and they are also the ones who are quickly led astray by Puck's misdeeds. Puck states that “Cupid is a rascally boy, therefore to drive poor women mad” (Shakespeare, 166). This statement places women on the suffering side of romantic union, as Shakespeare could easily have replaced the word "women" with "humans." Although this play is at times a comedy, the dark undertones are revealed more and more as the play progresses. In his final speech, Puck uses a mysteriously eerie tone that reflects the darkness hidden beneath the comedic surface of A Mid Summer 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 stupidest thing I ever heard" (Shakespeare, 170). The seriousness of Puck's speech is accentuated because it directly follows this comic production. Puck declares: Now the hungry lion roars, / And the wolf howls at the moon; / While the big plowman snores, / All with one weary task abandoned. / Now the wasted embers shine, while the owl scratching loudly, / Puts the wretch who lies in misfortune / In memory of a shroud. / Now it's time for night / Let the tombs all gape / Everyone lets out their elf, / In the paths of the church to slide: / And we, the fairies, who run / By the team of the triple Hecate, / From the presence of the sun / After the darkness like a dream, / Now we frolic; not a mouse / Shall disturb this sacred house: / I am sent with a broom before, 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 open wide", the "plowman snores" and the "wretched man lies in misery". The idea presented here is that humans are seen as real, but ultimately they grow old and die while fairies live in imagination, and imagination will never die. It forces the audience to think about what is more real, our dreams or reality as we know it. Shakespeare made Puck famous, known in mythology 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 in ? 153-173