Puck in popular culture appearance is in William Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream". As Robin Goodfellow, Puck appears in a roughly contemporaneous Elizabethan play, "Grim the Collier of Croydon" (1600). It is unknown how Shakespeare's Puck appeared on the stage; but the figure in "Grim" was costumed "in a suit of leather close to his body; his face and hands coloured russet-coloured, with a flail." Puck is the story-framer in "Puck of Pook's Hill" (1906) and "Rewards and Fairies" (1910) short story cycles by Rudyard Kipling. In Susanna Clarke's short story "The Ladies of Grace Adieu," Robin Goodfellow appears as a mischievous yet caring
A Midsummer Night's Dream inspired by the play, that was first performed in 1827. In 1842, partly because of the fame of the overture, and partly because his employer King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia liked the incidental music that Mendelssohn had written for other plays that had been staged at the palace in German translation, Mendelssohn was commissioned to write incidental music for a production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" that was to be staged in 1843 in Potsdam. He incorporated the existing Overture into the incidental music, which was used in most stage versions through the 19th century. The best known of