(I did warn you, to be fair.)
Possibly one of the best known Shakespeare plays, this comedy is a classic example of a scene stealer — of a character who the writer did not expect to be the favorite in the play, nor one the critics rave about.
Too often, scholars attempt to make this play a “serious” offering, citing the omnipotent Oberon, proud, “Ill-met by moonlight” Tatiana, or the mechanicals — specifically, Nick Bottom. I’ve even seem some postulating about the four faeries being the central players. And all of these scholarly attempts try to ignore the giant hurdle that anyone studying Midsummer Night’s Dream has to deal with:
Puck.
And it’s really not their fault — Puck should be simply a mischievous faerie, Oberon’s right-hand-man, and a slightly ambivalent force, morality wise.
But he’s just so much fun to read, let’s be real.
And that’s why people love this play — sure, the absurdity of the mechanical’s production is great, and the guy with the last name ‘Bottom’ being turned into a donkey — that’s prime humor right there — but Puck makes the whole thing work; he is excitable, driven, and constantly in motion. Add to that a healthy appreciation for the absurd –he may as well be eating popcorn with Oberon during the majority of the play — and you have an eminently likable character, if not a wholly moral one.
((Spoiler alert for Shakespeare: his best characters are generally some flavor of amoral.))
If you boil down the elements of the play, it shouldn’t be all that uplifting — we have a woman who has to choose between becoming a nun, dying, or marrying a man she doesn’t love (or like, even, as he had been wooing her best friend before he caught sight of her), her star-crossed lover who is poisoned (accidentally) by a faerie king, a woman whose lover lost interest in her and is desperate to get him back, and a man who violates chivalry, decorum, and good sense, forced to marry an old lover whom he has no tender feelings for — while being bewitched out of his senses permanently.
Add to that a faerie king and queen who are bickering over the life of a mortal, which ends with the king poisoning the queen (temporarily) and making her fall in love with a donkey, then never getting any sort of punishment once she wakes.
Yikes.
This is not a play with a whole lot of ‘nice’ characters. It’s worth noting that Puck might be the character that has endured beyond the play simply because he is the only one who points out the complete absurdity, frowning at the scene in front of him, then learning to enjoy said complete absurdity in a way that none of the other characters can, due to their investment in the plot.
In media, there is a need for someone who cuts the theming and the mood, who is willing to stand back and look at the world they live in and question it. In the ABC series Once Upon a Time, the main character — Emma Swan — served this purpose (though she no longer does, which is part of the reason the show has gone so sharply downhill, but that’s a scream for another time).
This is the same reason why the 2nd and 3rd seasons of Gilmore Girls were so much more realistic than the rest — though Luke occasionally served this purpose, he had lived in Star’s Hollow too long to not get caught up in the almost insufferable quirkiness of its citizens. We needed an outsider — the character of Jess — to look around and say that, yeah, the town meetings are a bit To Kill A Mockingbird.
If you’re looking for a less modern example, look to Pride and Prejudice‘s Elizabeth Bennet, whose own father categorizes her as a “connoisseur of human folly”. She did this too — looked at the world around her and sighed–half-resigned, half-amused–along with Puck — “Lord, what fools these mortals be!”
These characters may not always be the most moral or charitable characters — neither Emma nor Jess were, certainly — but they give us an insight to the world; they tell us not that we are outsiders, but merely observers of a world that existed before us and would go on after us. They are integral to our understanding of the world, but also serve to make us invested — not just in the world, but in the world as a construct.
And I think that’s something to scream about.
Something to Scream About 