Puck example essay topic

Robin Goodfellow, also known as Puck or Hobgoblin, is a merry sprite, represented as "a very Shetland er among the gossamer-winged, dainty-limbed fairies, strong enough to knock all their heads together, a rough, knurly-limbed, fawn-faced, shock-pate d, mischievous little urchin". Since Puck has no human feelings, he has no precise human meaning. He is strategic in A Midsummer Night's Dream as he is seen not only as a spectator of the plays happenings, but as a commentator and interpreter of the plays actions. Puck brings about the confusion of the young Athenians as he tries to carry out Oberon's wishes; the king has taken pity on Helena and hopes to turn Demetrius scorn for her into love. Puck simply enchants the first male he sees, not realizing that it is the wrong person. Here is introduced the fact that just because he is a supernatural being he can't make a mistake.

In fact, he makes several. With great amusement, however, he watches the confusion he has made and comments "Lord, what fools these mortals be!" Puck is an ambivalent figure, a mischief-maker at best, and something weirder also, though the play confines him to harmlessness, and indeed bring benignity out of his antics. He is definitely seen more as a prankster than a wicked sprite. The word puck or pook originally meant a demon out for mischief or a wicked man, and Robin Goodfellow was once a popular name for the Devil. Puck, however, is neither wicked nor the Devil, and can be seen as benevolent.

Although the world of the fairies exhibits several characteristics common to popular belief and folklore tradition, it is to a considerable extent a new creation of Shakespeare's own. This is particularly true when we think of Puck, whose descent from Robin Goodfellow or Hobgoblin only accounts for one aspect of his being. If one examines the numerous statements that Puck utters about himself and that the others utter about him, one immediately realizes that Shakespeare has created a complex dramatic future to whom is assigned a key position within the fabric of the play. He is assigned the role of spectator several times, and as such he comments on the action.

Clearly Robin Goodfellow evolved in fairy lore as a supernatural explanation for the many trivial mishaps and accidents so commonplace in domestic living. He is the most purely entertaining of the fairy band. The error on Puck's part that we see in the beginning bears a deep significance for it shows that the fairies do err and that the influences they exert as supernatural agents in the play do not in the least answer to anything providential, but rather contain filaments of arbitrariness, self-depreciation, and folly. Yet his interventions in the development are as much the result of a casual mood or mischievous him as they are the result of premeditated instructions from his master, Oberon.