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 he extracted Bottom and his companions and acted the rest, in an adaptation called "The Fairies." Frederic Reynolds produced an operatic version in 1816. In 1840, Madame Vestris at Covent Garden returned the play to the stage with a relatively full text, adding musical sequences and balletic dances. Vestris took the role of Oberon, and for the next seventy years, Oberon and Puck would always be played by women. After the success of Madame Vestris' production, 19th-century theatre continued to stage the "Dream" as a spectacle, often with a cast numbering nearly one hundred. Detailed sets were created for the