In Shakespeare's play A Midsummer Night's Dream, Puck is an interesting character. He is the servant fairy, but he is a different kind of fairy from fairy King and Queen Oberon and Titania. Although he plays the part of Oberon's servant and messenger, he is more like the goblins that appeared in fairy stories. In the play he also called Robin Goodfellow and Hobgoblin and this character was a mischievous fellow, well known in many fairy tales for the pranks he played.
Puck plays jokes on ordinary village folk. Sometimes he upsets the dairymaids by skimming the cream from the milk or by getting in the dairy churn so that they cannot turn the cream into butter. On other occasions, he spoils beer which is being brewed, just for fun. Another favorite trick is to transform himself into a crab-apple hidden inside a jug of ale. Then when an old grandmother sips the ale, he bobs against her lips so that she spills it. His best 'joke', however, is to whip away a stool from an old lady as she is talking so that when she falls flat on the floor, everybody laughs.
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