How Does Shakespeare Present Puck In A Midsummer Night's Dream

Shakespeare 's Plays Within Plays and Characters Within Characters

In A Midsummer Night 's Dream, Shakespeare creates in Bottom, Oberon, and Puck distinctive characters who represent different aspects of himself. Like Bottom, Shakespeare aspires to rise socially; he has ambitions, and interacts with the queen, however marginally. Through Bottom, Shakespeare mocks these pretensions within himself. Then again, Shakespeare also resembles Oberon, controlling the magic we see on the stage; unseen, he and Oberon pull the strings that make the characters act as they do and say what they say. And finally, Shakespeare is like Puck, standing back from the other characters, able to see their weaknesses and laugh at them, and enjoying some mischief
He calls Bottom "the shallowest thick-skin of that barren sort" (3.2.13) when he applies the ass 's head. Puck is Shakespeare, doing what he will with the characters, naming them, making them what he wants them to be, ridiculing them at will. Puck is one layer removed from the play, able to step outside it. He sees himself as both the audience and the actor: "What, a play toward? I 'll be an auditor; / An actor too, perhaps, if I see cause" (3.1.68-69). Like Shakespeare, Puck is behind and outside the play as well as inside it. By his ability to be both audience and player, Puck collapses the boundaries between play and reality. Shakespeare as both playwright and actor does the
Puck laughs at the lovers: "Lord, what fools these mortals be!" (3.2.115). He enjoys watching Lysander chase Helena, calling it a "fond pageant" (3.2.114). He doesn 't feel sorry for the young lovers as Oberon does. Puck enjoys teasing them: "Cupid is a knavish lad, / Thus to make poor females mad" (3.3.28-29). Likewise, Shakespeare doesn 't seem to feel sorry for his characters when he manipulates them to serve the needs of the play. Shakespeare is surely a "knavish lad" when he writes plays like A Midsummer Night 's Dream and encourages the audience to laugh at his characters ' foolishness. When Puck playfully puts all four lovers asleep, reciting nursery rhymes as he does so Ð "Jack shall have Jill, / Nought shall go ill" Ð one can almost hear Shakespeare humming under his breath as he manipulates the characters (3.3.45-46). Shakespeare is mischievous like Puck when he makes Bottom recite the lines, "O night, O night; alack, alack, alack"