Puck, or ROBIN GOODFELLOW, a familiar figure in the fairy-world of old English folklore, immortalised by Shakespeare in the Midsummer Night's Dream. His characterisation here keeps close to popular tradition in the merry tricks and mischievousness attributed to him. The name is really a generic term for a fairy, and we recognise it further in the Icelandic puki, the Irish pooca, the Welsh pwcca, even the Cornish pixie, and the Puk and Niss Puk of the Frisians and Danes. The Pucks occasionally perform kindly domestic functions, are small and dwarf-like in appearance, attach themselves to particular households, and are easily propitiated by offerings of cream and kindly names like the Irish 'good people,' the Scotch 'good neighbours.' They may assume the form of a horse, a hound, or the like, and are even confounded with such dancing lights as the Will-o'-the-Wisp or Jack o' Lanthorn. Obvious analogies suggest themselves with the Silesian
Rubezahl, the Scotch Brownie, the Norse Troll, whose more malignant aspects connect them with the wider world of Demonology (q.v.). Robin Goodfellow once filled a prominent place in the popular imagination—we meet him at full length in the 1628 black-letter tract, Robin Goodfellow; his mad pranks, and merry Jestes, full of honest mirth, and is a fit medicine for melancholy (repr. in Halliwell). Henslowe's Diary tells us that Chettle wrote a drama on his adventures; we find him again in Drayton's Nymphidia, Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, Ben Jonson's Masque of Love Restored. As Lob, Hobgoblin, and the Lubber-fiend also the allusions to him in our earlier literature are endless.—The name Puck was taken for its title by the well-known New York counterpart to Punch.
See J. O. Halliwell's Illustrations of the Fairy Mythology of A Midsummer Night's Dream (Shakesp. Soc. 1845); W. J. Thom's Three Notelets on Shakespeare (1865); and W. C. Hazlitt's Fairy Tales, &c., illustrating Shakespeare and other English Writers (1875).