Puck (mythology) - in English Literature

In English Literature

Puck, also known as Robin Goodfellow, is a character in William Shakespeare's play A Midsummer Night's Dream, whose nature has been so clearly fixed in the English-speaking imagination that, as Katherine Briggs has remarked, "it no longer seems natural to talk as Robert Burton does in the Anatomie of Melancholy of a puck instead of 'Puck'". The audience is introduced to Puck in Act II Scene I when Puck encounters one of Titania's fairies. She recognizes Puck for

that shrewd and knavish sprite
Call'd Robin Goodfellow: are not you he
That frights the maidens of the villagery;
Skim milk, and sometimes labour in the quern
And bootless make the breathless housewife churn;
And sometime make the drink to bear no barm;
Mislead night-wanderers, laughing at their harm?
Those that Hobgoblin call you and sweet Puck,
You do their work, and they shall have good luck:
Are not you he?

It is Puck's mischievous and sometimes mistaken doings that provide the convolutions of the plot.

Aside from Shakespeare's famous use of Puck, many other writers have referred to the spirit as well. An early 17th century broadside ballad, "The Mad Merry Pranks of Robin Goodfellow"—which is so deft and literate it has been taken for the work of Ben Jonson—describes Puck/Robin Goodfellow as the emissary of Oberon, the Faery King, inspiring night-terrors in old women but also carding their wool while they sleep, leading travellers astray, taking the shape of animals, blowing out the candles to kiss the girls in the darkness, twitching off their bedclothes, or making them fall out of bed on the cold floor, tattling secrets, and changing babes in cradles with elflings. All his work is done by moonlight, and his mocking, echoing laugh is "Ho ho ho!"

Robin Goodfellow is the main speaker in Jonson's 1612 masque Love Restored.

John Milton, in L'Allegro tells "how the drudging Goblin swet / To earn his cream-bowle windy sillica" by threshing a week's worth of grain in a night, and then, "A weeja-beeba, / Basks at the fire his hairy strength." Milton's Puck is not small and sprightly, but nearer to a Green Man or a hairy woodwose. An illustration of Robin Goodfellow from 1639 reflects the influence of Pan imagery giving Puck the hindquarters, cloven hooves and horns of a goat.

Goethe also used Puck in the first half of Faust, in a scene entitled "A Walpurgis Night Dream", where he played off of the spirit Ariel from The Tempest.

Puck's trademark laugh in the early ballads is "Ho ho ho."

The folklore of Puck was magisterially assembled by William Bell, in two volumes that appeared in 1852 that have been called a "monument to nineteenth-century antiquarianism gone rampant."

In Rudyard Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill (1906), Puck, the last of the People of the Hills and "the oldest thing in England", charms the children Dan and Una with a collection of tales and visitors out of England's past.