Puck in popular culture (a modern retelling of the Scottish faerie ballad), the character of Robin Armin is implied to be Puck; he used a similar name while performing as a singer and actor for The King's Men, and had been the inspiration for the Shakespearean Puck and several other comic characters, but he and the others of his troupe were unsuccessful in luring the Bard off to the Fair Lands. In Mercedes Lackey's novel "The Wizard of London" Robin Goodfellow/Puck steps in to play himself in a boarding school's production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" when no one suitable can be found for
A Midsummer Night's Dream essay "does not (seek to) rewrite "A Midsummer Night's Dream" as a gay play but rather explores some of its 'homoerotic significations' ... moments of 'queer' disruption and eruption in this Shakespearean comedy." Green does not consider Shakespeare to have been a "sexual radical", but that the play represented a "topsy-turvy world" or "temporary holiday" that mediates or negotiates the "discontents of civilisation", which while resolved neatly in the story's conclusion, do not resolve so neatly in real life. Green writes that the "sodomitical elements", "homoeroticism", "lesbianism", and even "compulsory heterosexuality"—the first hint of which may be Oberon's obsession with