This Is Shakespeare

by Emma Smith

He’s naughty, yes – the dictionary definition for the nineteenth-century adjective ‘puckish’ sums it up as ‘impish, mischievous, capricious’ – but never malign. He observes the human world with dispassionate wisdom: ‘Lord, what fools these mortals be!’ (3.2.115). Puck’s short, rhyming lines and playful physical jests place him centre stage in the imagination of a play that, since the Victorian period, has been seen as delightfully innocent and childlike. In fact, Elizabethan ideas of Puck were far from this cheery, domesticated fairy trickster. Shakespeare actually calls his character Robin Goodfellow, a name that suggested to contemporary culture a frightening hobgoblin with a potentially diabolic lineage.