Puck (A Midsummer Night's Dream) be inconsistent about what they call characters, but Puck's is a particularly awkward case. Both the Quarto and the First Folio call the character "Robin Goodfellow" on the first entrance, but "Puck" later in the same scene, and they remain inconsistent. The Arden Shakespeare calls the character "Puck," and amends all stage directions (but not actual dialogue) that refer to the character as "Robin" or "Robin Goodfellow". Puck (A Midsummer Night's Dream) Puck, also known as Robin Goodfellow, is a character in William Shakespeare's play "A Midsummer Night's Dream", based on the ancient figure of Puck found in English mythology.
A Midsummer Night's Dream Oberon is a "horrid brute". Towards the end of the 19th century, Georg Brandes (1895–6) and Frederick S. Boas (1896) were the last major additions to "A Midsummer Night's Dream" criticism. Brandes' approach to anticipates later psychological readings, seeing Oberon's magic as symbolic and "typifying the sorcery of the erotic imagination". Brandes felt that in the play, Shakespeare looks inward at the "domain of the unconscious". Boas eschews the play as ethical treatise or psychological study and instead takes a more historicist and literal approach. To Boas the play is, despite its fantastical and exotic trappings, "essentially English and Elizabethan".