Puck and Folklore Puck and Folklore Author Rand Einfeldt Supervising Editor Kate McPherson Editor Kate McPherson Copy Editor Leah Hamby Senior Encoder Leah Hamby Encoding and Metadata LEMDO Team Copyright Holder (Content) Kate McPherson Copyright Holder (XML and interface) University of Victoria Early Modern England Encyclopedia EMEE

Anthology Leads: Kate McPherson and Kate Moncrief.

 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Mitacs Globablink Research Internship

Released with Early Modern England Encyclopedia 1.0a

 University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform

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Early Modern England Encyclopedia

By Rand Einfeldt, inspired by Michael Best’s Shakespeare’s Life and Times, Internet Shakespeare Editions

Encoded in TEI P5 according to the LEMDO Customization and Encoding Guidelines

This document uses Canadian English spelling

 Document Types All documents in LEMDO are either born-digital documents or primary documents. Within those two general categories, LEMDO offers additional ways to categorize a file. Born-digital Born-digital documents are anything other than primary texts Critical Critical material, such as a general introduction or a textual introduction. Responsibilities Responsibilities Author A person, family, or organization responsible for creating a work that is primarily textual in content, regardless of media type (e.g., printed text, spoken word, electronic text, tactile text) or genre (e.g., poems, novels, screenplays, blogs). Use also for persons, etc., creating a new work by paraphrasing, rewriting, or adapting works by another creator such that the modification has substantially changed the nature and content of the original or changed the medium of expression. LEMDO uses the term author in two contexts: (1) to indicate the author of a primary work or document (such as Hamlet), and (2) to indicate the author of a secondary text (such as the Critical Introduction to <title level="m">Hamlet, by David Bevington). Editor A person, family, or organization contributing to a resource by revising or elucidating the content, e.g., adding an introduction, notes, or other critical matter. An editor may also prepare a resource for production, publication, or distribution. For major revisions, adaptations, etc., that substantially change the nature and content of the original work, resulting in a new work, see author. LEMDO uses the general term editor only in edition metadata and only to indicate when a person is responsible for editing all parts of an edition. Otherwise, use the more granular terms to describe the precise nature of the editorial role. Supervising Editor An editor who supervises the work of a student editor. Copy Editor LEMDO uses the term owner for the person who checks facts, quotations, and citations; may make formatting changes; may convert from one citation style to another; may suggest wording changes; and enforces conformity with the project style guide. Markup Editor A person or organization performing the coding of SGML, HTML, or XML markup of metadata, text, etc. Gloss needed. Copyright Holder A person or organization to whom copy and legal rights have been granted or transferred for the intellectual content of a work. The copyright holder, although not necessarily the creator of the work, usually has the exclusive right to benefit financially from the sale and use of the work to which the associated copyright protection applies. Normally the editor is the copyright holder for an LEMDO edition. EMEE Keywords Culture Learn about the customs, beliefs, and daily lives of people in early modern England. Gender Sexuality Published file. Updated metadata proofed Review of article finished. updated author respStmt. Created File. Michael Best 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.

 Rand Einfeldt Rand Einfeldt

Rand Einfeldt was a student at Utah Valley University.

 Leah Hamby 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.

 Navarra Houldin 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.

 Kate McPherson 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.

 LEMDO Team 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 https://www.uvic.ca/

Images 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

The 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 coltsThey 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

19th 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.

As 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 <title level="m">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.