Puck (Shakespeare)
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Puck, also known as Robin Goodfellow, is a character in William Shakespeare's play A Midsummer Night's Dream.
He is sent by Oberon to fetch the flower "love-in-idleness" and is told to apply its juice to the nostril of a sqiurrel "in Athenian garments" (meaning Demetrius). He erroneously administers the charm to the sleeping Lysander. He provides Nick Bottom with a donkey's head so that Titania (Fairy Queen) will fall in love with a beast and forget her attachment to the Indian. Later, he is ordered by Oberon to produce a dark fog, and to lead the rival lovers astray within it by imitating their voices, and then to apply a counter-charm to Lysander's eyes. At the end of the play he makes a speech explaining his actions that serves to trivialize the play itself if it has offended the audience "If we shadows have offended, Think but this, and all is mended: That you have but slumbered here, While these visions did appear." This line essentially connects the audience with the play itself and compares them to the Athenian witches who in the play did also awake from the mad happenings of the fairy world as if from a dream.
Trivia
- Puck also appears as a minor character in Neil Gaiman's Sandman epic. (see Characters of The Sandman)
