Puck
Who is Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream?
What role does Puck play in the plot of A Midsummer Night’s Dream?
How does Puck contribute to the comedic elements of A Midsummer Night’s Dream?
What is the significance of Puck’s epilogue in A Midsummer Night’s Dream?
What are the sources of inspiration for Puck’s character?
Puck, the vivacious fairy, henchman for fairy king Oberon, and narrator in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, one of William Shakespeare’s middle comedies, written about 1595–96 and published in 1600 in a quarto edition from the author’s manuscript. As Oberon’s chief attendant, Puck, or Robin Goodfellow, acts as both errand-runner and agent of chaos, executing magical schemes to settle a dispute with fairy queen Titania and resolve the quarrels of four Athenian lovers (Hermia, Lysander, Helena, and Demetrius) who are lost in the woods. His enchantments deepen the romantic confusion, and his delight in trickery adds a comic countercurrent to the play. At the end he offers an epilogue that frames the entire tale as a dream.
Role in A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Mischief-maker and Oberon’s agent (Act II, scene 1)
Puck is introduced by an unnamed fairy as a “shrewd and knavish sprite” who “frights the maidens of the villagery.” A folkloric household trickster, Puck serves as Oberon’s jester and magical henchman. His first appearance in Act II, scene 1 is partly self-narrated: He boasts of assuming disguises, spoiling ale, and mimicking animals, establishing himself as the play’s purveyor of magical mischief:
I am that merry wanderer of the night.
I jest to Oberon, and make him smile
He enters the dramatic action through Oberon’s scheme to humiliate Titania. As a loyal servant, Puck is tasked with retrieving a special flower, “love-in-idleness,” which has the power to make a sleeping person “madly dote upon the next live creature that it sees.” Oberon intends to use this charm to punish Titania for lavishing affection on an Indian changeling boy. His instructions to Puck include an additional assignment: to apply the love potion to the eyelids of the “disdainful youth” Demetrius, whom Oberon has seen spurning the affections of the devoted Helena.
Botched enchantments and theatrical chaos (Act II, scene 2–Act III, scene 2)
In Act II, scene 2 Puck anoints Lysander’s eyes rather than Demetrius’s because he has trouble telling the men apart. As a result of this blunder, upon waking Lysander immediately transfers his affections from Hermia to Helena:
Content with Hermia? No, I do repent
The tedious minutes I with her have spent.
Not Hermia, but Helena I love.
When the lovers converge in the forest in Act III, scene 2, Puck is confronted by Oberon, who scolds him for his mistake. Puck defends himself, claiming that the men’s Athenian garments had confused him. Oberon then directs him to correct the error.
Yet Puck only escalates the farce when he stumbles upon a group of tradesmen rehearsing a play to perform at the wedding of Theseus, the duke of Athens. Puck transforms the weaver Nick Bottom by giving him the head of an ass, which frightens the other tradesmen away. Oberon, having earlier anointed Titania’s eyes with the “love-in-idleness” flower’s nectar, ensures that she wakes to see Bottom first. This positions Bottom as the object of Titania’s enchanted affection, thereby completing Oberon’s plot.
The lovers’ confusion, meanwhile, intensifies as both Lysander and Demetrius, now also enchanted, pursue Helena, leaving Hermia scorned and bewildered. Though delighted at the romantic confusion, Puck is instructed to remedy the situation. He uses mimicry and illusion to exhaust the lovers and apply the antidote to Lysander’s eyes.
Restoration and epilogue (Act IV, scene 1; Act V, epilogue)
Having resolved the lovers’ entanglements and witnessed Oberon’s reconciliation with Titania, Puck withdraws from the primary action. When Bottom is restored to his human form and the couples are united, Puck’s role shifts from manipulator to stage manager. In the play’s final moment, Puck reappears alone to deliver the epilogue. His speech functions as a theatrical device that blurs the boundary between performance and reality. Stepping outside the play’s action, a device known as “breaking the fourth wall,” in which a character acknowledges the presence of the audience, Puck directly addresses the viewers, inviting them to consider the entire tale as a fleeting dream:
If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended:
That you have but slumber’d here
While these visions did appear.
Character appraisal
Puck is the principal agent of mischief and enchantment in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Though he serves Oberon, his role in the play is more versatile, shifting from executor of Oberon’s commands to prankster and accidental disruptor of human love. Unlike Oberon, who seeks a return to order, Puck delights in the disorder. He takes pleasure in frightening mortals, mocking them in their confusion, and altering their appearances. When he places the ass’s head on Bottom, he relishes the result:
I’ll follow you. I’ll lead you about a round,
Through bog, through bush, through brake, through brier;
Sometime a horse I’ll be, sometime a hound,
A hog, a headless bear, sometime a fire;
His mistakes, however, are not malicious but gleeful. When Oberon scolds him for his first error, Puck responds with unapologetic humor, mocking the lovers’ fervent quarrels:
Lord, what fools these mortals be!
Despite his mischief, Puck is also the play’s final voice. In his epilogue he offers to mend any offense by suggesting that the entire play was but a dream. He belongs to both the fairy world and the world of the theater. He does not evolve in the moral sense that Oberon does, wherein the latter discovers the chaotic potential of the magical flower and uses it to resolve the Athenian lovers’ conflicts. Puck reveals the play’s deeper insight: that enchantment and illusion are not confined to magic but are part of human perception itself.
Sources and inspirations
Shakespeare’s Puck, or Robin Goodfellow, draws on a deep well of English and northern European folklore. In the play, he boasts of playing domestic pranks, misleading travelers, assuming the disguise of a roasted crab, and neighing like a foal. Such mischief closely mirrors the English tales of Robin Goodfellow (a hobgoblin or mischievous fairy) recorded in early collections of ballads such as The Mad Pranks and Merry Jests of Robin Goodfellow, where he demands milk or cream in exchange for help with household work, leads night wanderers astray, visits a wedding in the shape of a fiddler, and boxes mens’ ears.
Northern European traditions retain close analogues: the Irish pooka, the Welsh pwca, the Old Norse puki, and the Scandinavian puk or nisse. Indeed, the character’s very name, Puck, derives from Middle English pouke and Old English puca, both denoting a tricksy spirit or hobgoblin, terms still visible in dialect words such as “puckish.”
- Also called:
- Robin Goodfellow
Reginald Scot’s The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), a treatise written to expose what he viewed as superstitious beliefs, includes detailed accounts of fairies, witches, and magical transformations. Shakespeare, writing just a decade later, appears to both draw from and gently mock these traditions.