Robin Goodfellow Or Puck In A Midsummer Night's Dream

Improved Essays
William Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” is a play about the difficulties of love and how magic comes with a price. Puck also known as Robin Goodfellow is Oberon the King of the fairies jester. In this play, Robin Goodfellow or Puck could be a protagonist and an antagonist of this play for the soul fact that he causes all the conflict and he develops everyone. He is a troublemaker in the play because he applies the “love juice” to the wrong Athenians. Therefore, in this paper I am going to show how Robin Goodfellow or Puck is a round character and how he is symbolic to the play.
We first meet Robin Goodfellow on page (1523) when he says “How now, spirit, whither wander you?” Puck and another fairy start talking and she brings up him

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    Oberon and Robin Oberon. I believe Oberon would be better suited for today's world. In Shakespeare’s Fantasy/Comedy A Midsummer's Night Dream, There are four intertwined lovers playing for each others hearts. Along with the lovers there are everyday people practicing for plays and royalty preparing for their weddings. Behind the scenes though there are fairies.…

    • 842 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a play packed with mischief and mayhem. It is often referred to by modern-day scholars as the Elizabethan Inception, as there are multiple examples of “play within a play” devices, each embodying several themes and concepts. Among these are examples of the contrast of tragedy and comedy, the dynamics of the written and spoken word, and imagination vs. reality.…

    • 1186 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The Foil’s Feuding Facets William Shakespeare’s passionate drama The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet encaptures the salacious infatuation of two adolescents whose family’s strife ultimately causes the demise of both young lovers. Tybalt, a Capulet kinsman, and Benvolio, a kinsman of the adversary Montague family, aid in illustrating the acrimony of the households. As the drama ensues, the pacifistic and caring Benvolio and the violent, militant Tybalt develop into foils of one another. Benvolio, a gentleman of peace, fights throughout the drama to prevent conflicts from arising.…

    • 407 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    One of the most underlying and important themes of this play is the difficulties of love. Shakespeare touches on the fact that people fall in love with things that are beautiful to them; and will repeal things that are not. The attraction and draw to beauty might display a side of love at its most intense stage, but one of the main ideas in this play is that true love must surpass the mere external physical shell. A majority of the issues in this play arise from difficulties in romantic world, although it is not fully based on a love story. Demetrius and Lysander are both equally in love with Hermia, but she is only in love with Lysander.…

    • 1242 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Mischievous Puck In Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Robin Goodfellow, also known as puck, is more than just another character. Puck is known from English mythology known for creating mischief, and Shakespeare makes a fitting character to the name.…

    • 1297 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    A Midsummer’s Nightmare Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream suggests that its relationships are happy ones, but this suggestion is complicated. In fact, the interplay between each of the couples indicates a nefarious quality present in all these relationships.…

    • 1302 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Claudio And Benedick Foil

    • 909 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Character foils and relations have a great impact on the meaning and structure of literature all around the world. The play “Much Ado About Nothing” by WIlliam Shakespeare, takes place in Messina, Italy where the characters are reunited after many of them being away in war. Throughout the book, each character is faced with a struggle they must overcome ranging from tragic events, broken relationships, to even internal conflicts. In the play, Shakespeare uses character foils as a way of enhancing and developing the plot of the story while illuminating the meaning of his work. In the play, Claudio and Benedick are foils of each other due to their opposing personalities, reactions, and morals.…

    • 909 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved 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
  • Improved Essays

    “Gloucester is no less a tragic figure than his king.” By consider the role and dramatic presentation of Gloucester in the play, evaluate this view. The story of Gloucester and the mirroring story of Lear in Shakespeare's ‘King Lear’ presents both men as tragic figures, although it is arguable if Gloucester fills the requirements set out by the tragic heroes in the stories from Ancient Greece as well as his King does. In Poetics, Aristotle defines the tragic figures downfall as something that “must not be the spectacle of a virtue,” meaning that the focus of the tragic figure should not be on the loss of their wealth and status. The figure must allow the audience to feel “pity” for them, pity for the excessive amount of punishment their flaws cause them.…

    • 916 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The entire drama is constructed around a group of contrasts and repetitions. Almost every feature presented in the play has its opposite: Helena is tall - Hermia is short; Pak is a jester – Bottom is a victim of the joke; Titania is beautiful – Bottom is grotesque. Moreover, the three main character groups (derived from Greek mythology, English folklore, and classical literature) are designed to firmly oppose each other: fairies are graceful and magical, craftsmen are clumsy and down-to-earth, whereas lovers are too serious. Contrast serves as defining visual characteristic of A Midsummer Night's Dream, and its surreal atmosphere and, perhaps, its central motive since there is no scene in the play without a contrast.…

    • 800 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    William Shakespeare’s comedy play A Midsummer Night’s Dream has a variety of characters, a determined nobleman, a love-struck woman, a meddlesome fairy, but most importantly, a man of rationality, Theseus. He is the Duke of Athens and if any citizen has any sort of dilemma, they would feel obliged to go to Theseus. In the 5th and final act of Shakespeare’s play, Theseus goes on a poetic rant on how the main characters of the play are exaggerating on their enchanted night, and how he sees poetry and love to be foolish. Theseus’ speech is appropriate to him in the way that his character is the pure embodiment of rationality. (Shakespeare 5.1.2-22)…

    • 601 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    During Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the blood-stained hand is a recurring symbol which is used to contribute to the understanding of human nature and the struggle with acts of evil and its consequences, which subsequently leads to the downfall of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. The concepts explored throughout the use of this symbol include the acts of evil, which then leave the characters filled with guilt and remorse and this finally results in the overthrow of natural order. The acts of good and evil are explored throughout the play with the use of several characters and events.…

    • 1388 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare, there are two prominent settings with opposing forces that are central to the context of the play. These two different settings explain Shakespeare’s underlying messages and themes that he wanted to convey to his audience. The setting the readers are introduced to first, Athens, is meant to represent the harshness of the real world, while the other main location, the forest, has a more lovable and happier notion. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the dissimilarities of the setting enhance the mood and conflicts, represent different ideas and themes, and portray Shakespeare’s personal ideas about how true love can overcome obstacles, especially with the help of imagination and altered minds.…

    • 757 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is filled with details up to reader interpretation from hypothetical curtain open, to curtain close. If the title of the play did not give it away, dreams are obviously at the forefront of these interpretations. Shakespeare’s play is a story of dreams and magic versus the harsh reality of love and real life. It follows, primarily, a few different groups of characters: there are four young lovers (Helena, Hermia, Demetrius, and Lysander) who form a convoluted sort of love-quadrilateral, if you will (initially, Hermia and Lysander are in love while Helena loves Demetrius but Demetrius loves Hermia); there is a company of amateur and unprofessional actors, most importantly a weaver named Nick Bottom,…

    • 1240 Words
    • 5 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