Puck In 'A Midsummer Night's Dream'

Improved Essays
The main important traits of Puck (the main character) include;

i. Puck has miscreant spirit and capricious wit

Puck sets into action most of the events in the play through deliberate hoaxes on the other characters, coupled with his proclivity of committing calculated and unfortunate mistakes. To corroborate this claim, he casts the spell from the magical love juice on a wrong man’s eye (Lysander), triggering a love triangle that cascades into epic confusion, nearly causing blood shade in the woods. He does this to conceive some intimacy between Demetrius and Helena, which blossoms into marriage. As the play draws to the end, Puck mischievously quips to the audience that the events witnessed were only a dream. This equally

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    She believes that Hermia now hates her. This humungous tangle is caused by a fairy named as Puck. He is a very mischievous fairy and will do anything of his master’s command. His master’s name is Oberon; he is the King of the fairies in the woods. This dramatic tangle produces a glimpse of calamity and a narrow window of humour of Helena’s confusion.…

    • 617 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    He tries to manipulate the situation so that Helena gets her love, Lysander and Hermia stay together, and he can teach Titania a lesson on how to be a submissive and adoring wife. However, just as the laborers' play turns a tragic drama into a comedy, so does Oberon's when Puck accidentally puts the love-potion on the eyes of the wrong man. And yet Oberon's play also serves a counter purpose to the laborers' play. While the laborers' awful performance seems to suggest the limit of the theater, Oberon's play (or the events of A Midsummer Night’s Dream) altered the lives of the same mortals who mock the laborers' play, suggests that theater really does have a magic that defies…

    • 1186 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The juice is a spell that causes the character to fall in love with the first living organism they see. As a result, puck applies the juice to the eyes of the fairy queen Titania, from the magic world, and an Athenian man named Lysander, from the “real” world. Puck was suppose to put the juice on Demetrius, but he applied it to the wrong Athenian man. After they all woke up, the queen fell in love with a monster, and Lysander fell in love with another women, Helena, when he originally love Hermia. Realizing he made a mistake, Puck attempted to reconcile it and gave the original Athenian man, Demetrius, the potion who also falls in love with…

    • 863 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Instructed by Oberon, Puck, Oberon’s jester, goes out and messes with the rude mechanicals as well as the lovers. Everything that occurs in the woods is a result of rampant…

    • 923 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    This shows that puck is a bad character and that he will not do any pleasant thing willingly or on purpose. The only time that puck does something nice is when Oberon his master tells him to, puck has to listen to Oberon. Puck almost never takes responsibility for what he has done. When puck had to fix what he had done he made them believe this was all a dream which is not owning up to what he had…

    • 473 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Decent Essays

    King, Oberon. Puck is troublesome, and likes to fool around with people to annoy them. Examples of this are shown all throughout Act 3, like “ The shallowest thick-skin of that barren sort, who Pyramus presented, in their sport—Forsook his scheme, and enter’d in a brake/ An ass’s nole I fixed on his head”(3.2.13-17). His temptation to cause mischief led his to put on a donkey’s head on Bottom, simply because he had nothing better to do. Robin Goodfellow can be puckish, but he make genuine mistakes as well.…

    • 242 Words
    • 1 Pages
    Decent Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Puck is mischievous in many ways. The first example of Puck being mischievous is when he changes Bottom’s head into a head of an ass: “An ass's nole I fixed on his head.” (Shakespeare 32) Puck does this as a prank because he enjoys playing tricks on mortals and fairies alike.…

    • 427 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    “This is an unflattering representation of love as the boy Cupid, capricious and undependable, blind and waggish, loving, like Puck, to play jokes with a malicious intent—an alternative version of Lysander’s speech asserting that “The course of true love never did run smooth” (Charney 31). In both the passage by Shakespeare and the analysis by Charney, Cupid is described as blind with wings, almost inevitably making him reckless and having poor judgment. Puck mirrors the characteristics of Cupid because of his fickle and undependable nature, along with his use of the love potion to influence Titania, Lysander, and Demetrius. The actions of Puck add another dimension to the concept of love’s difficulty because his incompetence to use the potion causes temporary disorder in the already imbalanced love dynamic between the four young…

    • 2063 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Puck then decided to cast spells that would cause there to be a magical mist, so that he could lead all the lovers in one place, so that the lovers would wake up and visualy see the one that they love by imitating their voices. At the end the lovers do end up with the correct…

    • 1648 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In this story Oberon gives Robin, or Puck, something to put on Demetrius’s eyes that will make him fall in love with Helena, but Puck mistakes someone else for Demetrius & puts it on them, causing everything to go wrong. Oberon tells Puck to put it on Demetrius’s eyes “... A sweet Athenian lady is in love with a young man who wants nothing to do with her. Put some of this flower’s juice on his eyes, & make sure to do it in such a way the next thing he sees will be the lady….”(Shakespeare Act, 2 Scene 1. 260-263), Robin sees Lysander & Hermia, then mistakes them for Demetrius “...(he sees Lysander & Hermia)…

    • 739 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    He then turns Nick Bottom back to human after Oberon undoes Titania’s love potion. Then he make it seem like it was all a dream for all the characters and everyone is convinced that they just tried to sneak out and then all was a blank after that. At the very end of the book in scene 5, Puck speaks directly to the audience and says “If we shadows have offended,/ Think but this and all is mended:/ That you have but slumbered here/ While these visions did appear.” (Shakespeare 5.1.440-444).…

    • 1297 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Demetrius has disrupted his relationship with Helena so he could try to win the love of Hermia. Later in the play, Puck finds out that he has made mistake. He uses the potion again to make Demetrius fall in love with Helen but does not take the effect of the potion off of Lysander. This results in both Demetrius and Lysander being in love with Helena and causing Helena to think that she is being mocked by them as well as by Hermia. She cannot comprehend the sudden shift of love towards her and she “perceive[s] they have conjoin’d all three/ to bait [her] with this foul derision” (III.ii.193-194).…

    • 1013 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Great Essays

    Love stories can end tragically or happily, be mocked or be celebrated, and be laughed at or loved by many. The story of Pyramus and Thisby in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, by William Shakespeare, is a tragic love story and told as if Shakespeare knew it himself. The love story is presented in a way that makes the audience laugh at them, which shows how love can be mocked but also celebrated. In A Midsummer Night 's Dream, by William Shakespeare, the couples, Hippolyta and Theseus, Hermia and Lysander, and Helena and Demetrius, are both mocked and celebrated for their love. Hippolyta and Theseus are the more mature couple, who is on the brink of marriage, in this story.…

    • 1419 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Puck’s careless, mischievous, cynical use of magic causes a ruckus among the cast of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”. He changes into different animals and objects to get a reaction out people, which make others laugh.. The magic created tension, comedy, and mended relationships. Without the magic, the play would have been stagnant and…

    • 1566 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Robin Goodfellow (Puck) and Oberon are seen as the tricksters of the play, and use their magic to destroy the relationships of both humans and fairies alike. When Titania refuses to hand over the young Indian prince to her king, Oberon decides to play a cruel trick on her and sends his servant Puck to retrieve a magical flower. The juice of this flower, after being spread over a sleeping person’s eyes, will cause that person to fall in love with the first creature they see when they wake up. Unfortunately, things do not go exactly as planned. As said by Robert W. Dent in Imagination in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,…

    • 1819 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Superior Essays

Related Topics