A mischievous fairy in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Robin would have been a familiar name to Shakespeare’s audiences, whose origins go much further back.
Who is Shakespeare's Puck?
‘Puck’ is a nickname for ‘Robin Goodfellow', who first appears in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Act 2, Scene 1. He is immediately introduced as a character whose behaviour is questionable, described by a fairy as a 'shrewd and knavish sprite... that frights the maidens of the villagery’.
Shakespeare’s Puck serves Oberon, the fairy king. Oberon asks Puck to find a magical flower that, when he squeezes the juice into someone’s eyes will make them fall in love with the first creature they see.
Oberon uses the plant on the Fairy Queen, Titania. Seizing an opportunity, Puck magically transforms the head of the tradesman, Bottom, into an ‘ass’ (a donkey), so when Titania awakes Bottom is the first thing she sees, and so she falls in love with a man with a donkey’s head.
Oberon directs Puck to use the flower juice on Lysander, so he will fall in love with Helena (who already loves him), but Puck mistakes Lysander for Demetrius, and squeezes the flower juice into the wrong lover’s eyes, causing chaos when both men fall madly in love with Helena.
It is Oberon, not Puck, who eventually fixes everything and removes all the enchantments, but Puck/Robin who ends the play, with these lines:
Robin Goodfellow in folklore
As folklore is primarily an oral tradition, it’s really hard to know how well known a character he was. We can only go on the printed references that have been left behind.
Robin Goodfellow (sometimes called Puck) was a mischievous but helpful sprite, who would assist with household chores but expected payment in the form of food and milk.
The earliest reference to Robin Goodfellow may have been in a 13th century manuscript, a collection of short stories which is now preserved in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. The manuscript describes a character called ‘Robinet’ or ‘Robin’, a hobgoblin (tiny mischievous creatures that resemble humans) who prevents soldiers from sleeping by making too much noise.
The earliest confirmed reference to ‘Robyn Godfelaws’ was in 1489, in the Paston Letters – a collection of letters written between the Paston family in Norfolk. In 1584 Anthony Munday mentions Robin Goodfellow in his play The Two Italian Gentlemen. This is around a decade before Shakespeare wrote A Midsummer Night’s Dream, between 1594 and 1596.
