초록 열기/닫기 버튼
Puck enters as the jester and lieutenant of Fairy King Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He lives in the fairyland but does not seem an inhabitant. To the modern audience, traditional fairies are beautiful, refined and ethereal things. But Puck is represented as rustic, crude, and sinister.We can find some clues to identify Puck from the old woodcut of the title page in the prose pamphlet Robin Good-fellow, His Mad Prankes and Merry Iests(1639). Robin Goodfellow is an alternative name of Puck. In the woodcut Robin Goodfellow has goat's horns on his head and goat's cloven feet, wearing only hairy breeches made of animal skins. He holds a large candle and a large broom. According to English folklore, this sprite likes to play practical jokes which make men frustrated, while he sometimes helps them with sweeping at midnight, grinding meal, and spinning hemp. He is also known for misleading travelers, shape-shifting, and expressing joy in his pranks with his loud laugh.Shakespeare’s Puck has similar characteristics. He is meddling in human affairs when he has a share in the love tangle of Athenian youths. He is pleased with things “that befall preposterously”(3.2.121) and laughs his signature laugh, “ho, ho, ho!”(3.2.421) Just as the Robin Goodfellow in the ballards is busy himself with supervising maidens and pinching sluts, so Puck in the play is bustling with performing Fairy King’s commands. Though this Puck is the polished Robin Goodfellow, he still has the marks of Hobgoblin. When he frightens Peter Quince and his company with the shape of “horse, hound, hog, bear”, and “fire”(3.1.106), and when he misleads the Athenian lovers through the forest all the night, he is the very Hobgoblin, “the merry wonderer of the night.”김 라 옥 (단독연구)우석대학교 영어영문학과 부교수전북 완주군 삼례읍 후정리 490kimraok@hanmail.net
키워드열기/닫기 버튼
Puck, Robin Goodfellow, Hobgoblin, broom, housekeeping spirit
