Puck Shakespeare Quotes

If we shadows have offended, Think but this, and all is mended, That you have but slumbered here While these visions did appear. And this weak and idle theme, No more yielding but a dream, Gentles, do not reprehend: If you pardon, we will mend: And, as I am an honest Puck, If we have unearned luck Now to 'scape the serpent's tongue, We will make amends ere long; Else the Puck a liar call; So, good night unto you all. Give me your hands, if we be friends, And Robin shall restore amends.

Up and down, up and down I will lead them up and down I am feared in field in town Goblin, lead them up and down

Captain of our fairy band, Helena is here at hand, And the youth, mistook by me, Pleading for a lover's fee. Shall we their fond pageant see? Lord, what fools these mortals be!

You've never heard of the Trickster King?" Puck asked, shocked. The girls shook their heads. "The Prince of Fairies? Robin Goodfellow? The Imp?" "Do you work for Santa?" Daphne asked. "I'm a fairy, not an elf!" Puck roared. "You really don't know who I am! Doesn't anyone read the classics anymore? Dozens of writers have warned about me. I'm in the most famous of all of William Shakespeare's plays." "I don't remember any Puck in Romeo and Juliet," Sabrina muttered, feeling a little amused at how the boy was reacting to his non-celebrity. "Besides Romeo and Juliet!" Puck shouted. "I'm the star of a Midsummer Night's Dream!" "Congratulation," Sabrina said flatly. "Never read it.

How now, spirit! Whither wander you?

Those that Hobgoblin call you and sweet Puck, You do their work, and they shall have good luck: Are not you he?' 'Thou speak'st aright; I am that merry wanderer of the night.

Fairy tales. That was all she could remember about fairies, and as she tried desperately to recall the ones she'd heard or read, she realized she knew of few with fairies in them. And the two before her were nothing like Rumpelstiltskin or Cinderella's fairy godmother. Elegant Oberon and Titiana, silly Puck--Shakespeare was no help, either. These two, with their changing shapes and their offhand cruelties, had their roots in horror movies.

Puck: Lord, what fools these mortals be!

I’ll follow you; I’ll lead you about a round, Through bog, through bush, through brake, through brier; Sometime a horse I’ll be, sometime a hound, A hog, a headless bear, sometime a fire; And neigh, and bark, and grunt, and roar, and burn, Like horse, hound, hog, bear, fire, at every turn.

There was a small public library on Ninety-third and Hooper. Mrs. Stella Keaton was the librarian. We’d known each other for years. She was a white lady from Wisconsin. Her husband had a fatal heart attack in ’34 and her two children died in a fire the year after that. Her only living relative had been an older brother who was stationed in San Diego with the navy for ten years. After his discharge he moved to L.A. When Mrs. Keaton had her tragedies he invited her to live with him. One year after that her brother, Horton, took ill, and after three months he died spitting up blood, in her arms. All Mrs. Keaton had was the Ninety-third Street branch. She treated the people who came in there like her siblings and she treated the children like her own. If you were a regular at the library she’d bake you a cake on your birthday and save the books you loved under the front desk. We were on a first-name basis, Stella and I, but I was unhappy that she held that job. I was unhappy because even though Stella was nice, she was still a white woman. A white woman from a place where there were only white Christians. To her Shakespeare was a god. I didn’t mind that, but what did she know about the folk tales and riddles and stories colored folks had been telling for centuries? What did she know about the language we spoke? I always heard her correcting children’s speech. “Not ‘I is,’ she’d say. “It’s ‘I am.’” And, of course, she was right. It’s just that little colored children listening to that proper white woman would never hear their own cadence in her words. They’d come to believe that they would have to abandon their own language and stories to become a part of her educated world. They would have to forfeit Waller for Mozart and Remus for Puck. They would enter a world where only white people spoke. And no matter how articulate Dickens and Voltaire were, those children wouldn’t have their own examples in the house of learning—the library.

Robin Goodfellow—A “puck” or mischievous fairy who delights in playing pranks on mortals; he is sometimes referred to simply as Puck. Robin is Oberon’s jester, and his antics are responsible for many of the complications that propel the play. At Oberon’s bidding, Robin sprinkles “love juice” in the eyes of various characters to change who they love, but he makes mistakes in his application that create conflicts Oberon never intended. Though Robin claims to make these mistakes honestly, he enjoys the conflict and mayhem that his mistakes cause.

[Re-enter PUCK, and BOTTOM with an ass’s head.] PYRAMUS ‘If I were fair, Thisbe, I were only thine:—’ QUINCE O monstrous! O strange! we are haunted. Pray, masters! fly, masters! Help! [Exeunt Clowns.] PUCK 90 I’ll follow you; I’ll lead you about a round, Through bog, through bush, through brake, through brier; Sometime a horse I’ll be, sometime a hound, A hog, a headless bear, sometime a fire; And neigh, and bark, and grunt, and roar, and burn, 95 Like horse, hound, hog, bear, fire, at every turn. [Exit.] BOTTOM Why do they run away? This is a knavery of them to make me afeard. [Re-enter SNOUT.]

Now the hungry lion roars, And the wolf behowls the moon,Whilst the heavy ploughman snores, All with weary task fordone

I’ll follow you; I’ll lead you about a round, Through bog, through bush, through brake, through brier; Sometime a horse I’ll be, sometime a hound, A hog, a headless bear, sometime a fire; And neigh, and bark, and grunt, and roar, and burn, Like horse, hound, hog, bear, fire, at every turn.

Shakespeare. I can’t believe I let a Colorado cowboy win an argument with a sneaky massage and Shakespeare. I don’t even like Romeo and Juliet. I’m a Puck fan.” “Did

Il n'y a que Shakespeare et toi à féliciter. (p. 16)

it is bewitching to watch both men [Burton and Gielgud] struggle for Shakespeare's meaning while they squirm as individuals beneath the weight of their own psychologies. This is the problem for every interpretive artist who ever drew breath. He must be true to the writer and true to himself. He literally serves two masters. To expect the interpreter to be a puppet who conceives and executes the ideal Hamlet (or Puck or Lady Macbeth or Merton of the Movies) is to deny the human condition. An actor can discipline his effects in order to avoid distortion of the play - giving up, sometimes, his most popular tricks - but to expect him to reject the totality of his personality in order to imitate The Character is madness. The actor is stuck with the character, but the character is also stuck the actor. Directors sometimes pretend that the character is everything and that the actor must adjust no matter how uncomfortable it makes him, but the actors job is to preserve himself somehow - not by distorting the play... but by admitting his own limitations, by knowing what he can make real for the audience and what he can't. If the actor has been miscast, he cannot compensate for the error by destroying his God-given nature on the stage. It is the producer's job to know beforehand how flexible the actor is.

Like the powerful hobman Robin/Puck, the faerie woman Sibylla mentioned by Scot or as Sib by Shakespeare, lives inside a mountain teaching Witches all the way over in Italy and yet also emerges in England and Scotland. Some faerie entities were so powerful that they had numerous Witch familiars and were linked to more than one location. Here the line between “faerie” and “God” or “Goddess” becomes very blurred. But in the Faerie Faith, which seems to display a continuous sliding scale of power, rather than clear distinctions between human, faerie and God, this is not to be thought unusual.

The alter ego can also wander like Puuk. In northern Germany, Puk or Puck designates a dwarf or a domestic genie.21 In Norse, puki is a spirit, a demon, or a dead person. In medieval England and Ireland, Puck is a sprite of sorts, and we find him at Oberon’s side in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

I auditioned for the next play our director, Dominic, had lined up: A Midsummer Night's Dream, touring at several different parks in the Puget Sound area in July and August. Dominic cast me as Puck. "A fairy?" Andy said, all innocence. "I know you're not going to comment on that," I said. "I could've made better jokes with 'Bottom.

Oberon’s role in Shakespeare’s play is to be ‘Captain of the fairy band’ and ‘King of shadows’ but also to be a magician, something akin to Prospero in The Tempest. There is, too, a suggestion that he differs in some degree from the rest of the fairies around him. When Puck warns of the imminent dawn that will drive the spirits away, Oberon replies “we are spirits of another sort,” and as such they are able to withstand the sun’s rays.

Puck is now a fairy known to all nations, but until he was taken up by Shakespeare for Midsummer Night’s Dream, there was no ‘Puck,’ but only ‘pucks,’ and these were just one type of hobgoblin amongst several.

The plurality of Britain’s godlings is one manifestation of a much wider phenomenon. Daniel Hraste and Krešimir Vuković associate ‘fluctuation between plural and singular’ with woodland godlings in particular, pointing to the examples of Faunus/the fauns and Silvanus/the silvani in the Latin tradition, and comparing it with Vedic tradition where groups of deities are common.96 However, groups of godlings were clearly more common in the Latin tradition than the example of the fauns and silvani; the nymphs, the Parcae, the Lares and the Penates are all obvious examples. In the same way, in early modern British folklore ‘Puck’ or ‘Robin Goodfellow’ was sometimes presented as a specific character (as in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream) and sometimes as a class of being (pucks), just as in Lithuanian folklore Velnias (the god of the underworld) is simultaneously one being and also a class of beings.

If we bloggers have offended, Think but this, and all is mended, That you have but wander’d here While this wordage did appear. And this sprightly, vigorous theme, No more yielding but a dream. © 2025, Stewart Stafford. All rights reserved.