Puck and Folklore

Para1Images of Robin Goodfellow, also known as Puck, depict the folklore about playful spirits common to England and neighboring countries such as Wales. Earlier, more sexual images such as the title page of Robin Good-Fellow, show Puck as a kind of satyr, with cloven hooves and an erect penis. The broom he holds may be associated with a Celtic marriage ceremony called handfasting where the hands of a man and woman were tied together to symbolize the bond between a husband and wife. Puck holding the broom may indicate his role in being a matchmaker to the key characters found in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Arthur Rackham’s early 20th century illustration show a childlike Puck, but he also holds a broom of sorts.

Puck’s Name

Para2The meaning for the name Puck derives from various languages and lore. For example, in Icelandic his name is puki which means “wee devil” or “imp”. According to Thomas Keightly, who explored this topic in the late 19th century in a book called The Fairy Mythology, some Welsh people have claimed that Shakespeare’s Puck originated from their folklore of the Pwka (pooka). He notes that pookas are described as being wicked-minded, black looking, bad things that would come in the form of wild colts […] They did great hurt to benighted travelers. William Bell, another 19th century folklore researcher, also published a three-volume series that explores Puck’s origins, Shakespeare’s Puck and His Folklore: Illustrated from the Superstitions of All Nations, Especially from the Earliest Religion and Rites of Northern Europe and the Wends, in 1852.

Puck in Early Modern Drama

Para319th century Shakespeare enthusiast (and forger) John Payne Collier reprinted a pamphlet about Robin Goodfellow in 1841. He notes that Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, in which Robin Good-fellow figures under the name of Puck (although his other designations are all given) was first printed in 1600, and probably it was not acted much before that year: at what- ever date it was brought out, it is evident that Shakespeare was acquainted with the tract entitled ‘Robin Good-fellow his mad Prankes and merry Jests. Collier goes on to note that other writers of the time, such as the comic actor Richard Tarleton, who worked with Shakespeare early in his career, published a work including Robin Goodfellow in 1588 and the writer Henry Chettle was paid by theater impresario Philip Henslowe in 1602 for a play with the title Robin Goodfellow. The first lines of the pamphlet contain this verse about Puck:
I’de wish you for to reade this booke,
If you his Pranks would know.
But first I will declare his birth,
And what his Mother was,
And then how Robin merrily
Did bring his knacks to passe.
In time of old, when Fayries us’d
To wander in the night,
And through key-holes swiftly glide,
Now marke my story right,
Among these pretty fairy Elves
Was Oberon, their King,
Who us’d to keepe them company
Still at their revelling.
Para4As Collier and these other scholars explore, Puck was a folk figure whose image and antics circulated widely in the popular imagination of the early modern period. William Shakespere’s version of the character absorbs and adapts many folk traditions as he entertains audiences in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Key Print Sources

Blount, Dale M. Modifications in Occult Folklore as a Comic Device in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Fifteenth-Century Studies vol. 9, 1984, pp. 1–13.
Button, Anne. Robin Goodfellow. The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare. Oxford University Press, 2001. p. 393.
Schleiner, Winifried. Imaginative Sources for Shakespeare’s Puck. Shakespeare Quarterly vol. 36, no. 1, Apr. 1985, pp. 65–68.

Key Online Sources

Best, Michael. Folklore. Shakespeare’s Life and Times. Internet Shakespeare Editions. University of Victoria, 11 Jan. 2004. https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/ideas/the%20supernatural/folklore.html. Accessed 11 Feb. 2026.
Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. Puck. Encyclopedia Britannica. 21 Apr. 2016. https://www.britannica.com/topic/puck-fairy. Accessed 31 Jan. 2024.
Collier, John Payne. The Mad Pranks and Merry Jests of Robin Goodfellow, Reprinted from the Edition of 1628. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/stream/madpranksmerryje00colluoft/madpranksmerryje00colluoft_djvu.txt. Accessed 2 Jul. 2024.
Keightley, Thomas. The Fairy Mythology: Illustrative of the Romance and Superstition of Various Countries. London, G. Bell, 1892. Project Gutenberg. 2012. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/41006/41006-h/41006-h.htm.

Prosopography

Kate McPherson

Kate McPherson is Professor of English and Honors Program Director at Utah Valley University (Orem, UT, USA). In 2015, she began working to redevelop Shakespeare’s Life and Times, created by Michael Best, into the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Her other publications include commentary on Pericles and The Comedy of Errors for the New Oxford Shakespeare (2016); the co-edited volumes Stages of Engagement: Drama and Religion in Post-Reformation England with James Mardock (Duquesne University Press, 2014) and Shakespeare Expressed: Page, Stage, and Classroom in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, with Kathryn M. Moncrief and Sarah Enloe (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013). With Kathryn M. Moncrief, Kate has also two edited collections, Performing Pedagogy in Early Modern England: Gender, Instruction, and Performance (Ashgate, 2011) and Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate 2008). She has also published numerous articles on early modern maternity in scholarly journals. Kate participated in the 2008 National Endowment for the Humanities Institute, Shakespeare’s Blackfriars: The Study, the Stage, the Classroom, at the American Shakespeare Center. She also served as Play Seminar Director, a public humanities position, for the Utah Shakespeare Festival in 2017 and 2018.

Leah Hamby

Leah Hamby is the primary encoder for the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Aside from encoding, she also works as an editor for the project and contributed several articles of her own. She has been working on the EMEE since February 2023. As of February 2026, she is soon to graduate with honours from Utah Valley University with a major in history and a minor in creative writing. Her other work with the LEMDO program includes remediating William Kemp’s Kemp’s Nine Day’s Wonder for the Digital Renaissance Editions.

Michael Best

Michael Best is Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria, BC. He founded the Internet Shakespeare Editions in 1996, and was Coordinating Editor until 2017, contributing two editions to the ISE: King John and King Lear (the latter also available in print from Broadview Press). In print, he has published editions of works of Elizabethan magic and huswifery, a collection of letters from the Australian goldfields, and Shakespeare on the Art of Love (2008). He contributed regular columns for the Shakespeare Newsletter on Electronic Shakespeares, and has written many articles and chapters for both print and online books and journals, principally on questions raised by the new medium in the editing and publication of texts. He has delivered papers and plenary lectures on electronic media and the Internet Shakespeare Editions at conferences in Canada, the USA, the UK, Spain, Australia, and Japan.

Navarra Houldin

Training and Documentation Lead 2025–present. LEMDO project manager 2022–2025. Textual remediator 2021–present. Navarra Houldin (they/them) completed their BA with a major in history and minor in Spanish at the University of Victoria in 2022. Their primary research was on gender and sexuality in early modern Europe and Latin America. They are continuing their education through an MA program in Gender and Social Justice Studies at the University of Alberta where they will specialize in Digital Humanities.

Rand Einfeldt

Rand Einfeldt was a student at Utah Valley University.

Orgography

LEMDO Team (LEMD1)

The LEMDO Team is based at the University of Victoria and normally comprises the project director, the lead developer, project manager, junior developers(s), remediators, encoders, and remediating editors.

University of Victoria (UVIC1)

https://www.uvic.ca/

Metadata

Authority title Puck and Folklore
Type of text Critical
Publisher University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform
Series Early Modern England Encyclopedia
Source
By Rand Einfeldt, inspired by Michael Best’s Shakespeare’s Life and Times, Internet Shakespeare Editions
Editorial declaration This document uses Canadian English spelling
Edition Released with Early Modern England Encyclopedia 1.0a
Sponsor(s)

Early Modern England Encyclopedia

Anthology Leads: Kate McPherson and Kate Moncrief.
Encoding description Encoded in TEI P5 according to the LEMDO Customization and Encoding Guidelines
Document status published, peer-reviewed
Funder(s) Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
Mitacs Globablink Research Internship
License/availability
Intellectual copyright in this entry is held by Kate McPherson on behalf of the contributors. Copyright on the TEI-XML markup is held by the University of Victoria on behalf of the LEMDO Team. The content and TEI-XML markup in this file are licensed under a CC BY-NC_ND 4.0 license. This file is freely downloadable without permission under the following conditions: (1) credit must be given to the authors, EMEE, and LEMDO in any subsequent use of the files and /or data; (2) this availability statement must remain in the file; (3) the content cannot be adapted or repurposed (except for quotations for the purposes of academic review and citation); and (4) commercial uses are not permitted without the knowledge and consent of the authors, EMEE, and LEMDO. Neither the content nor the code in this file is licensed for training large language models (LLMs), ingestion into an LLM, or any use in any artificial intelligence applications; such uses are considered to be commercial uses and are strictly prohibited.