The Place Between Human And Fey In A Midsummer Night's Dream

             The character of Puck is a landmark of this intersection. In many ways, he serves as a link between the mortal and fairy realms. He is active in both dimensions at once; that is to say, he causes action in both. He causes both mortal and fairy to fall in love, and plays pranks on both, as well; no other character in the play interacts with both planes in such an active manner, causing action in both realms. On another level, he serves as a link between the fictional realm (the illusion that the theater creates,) and the daily reality of the audience, when he addresses the audience directly in his final speech (ll. 409-24).
             There is also an intersection in the microcosm of Puck's identity; he is simultaneously poet and prankster, artistic and primal. He is described as a "shrewd and knavish sprite" (l. 33) while, in contrast, his name is "Goodfellow," and he tells us that he is "an honest Puck" (l. 417). Puck's personality encompasses both the kind, and the conniving, the lyrical and the base. The lyrical, in particular, is observed, not spoken of. We can observe Puck's rhythmic talents in his monologue that begins "Now the hungry lion roars," (ll. 357-76) for example. The speech is rhythmically uniform, generally following a trochee tetrameter pattern . The banal element is evident in his deliberate trickery - for example, the turning of Bottom into an ass (ll. 101-6), the prank pulled on the elderly aunt , or his enticement of a "fat and bean-fed horse" (l. 45) by "neighing in likeness of a filly foal" (l. 46).
             Puck, as a symbol for the overlap between human and fairy traits, suggests that "fairy" is, ultimately, the poet, lover, dreamer, joker, and wild animal within each of us, since these are the roles common to both a fairy and a human identity. This is especially true if we have "but slumbered" (l. 411) while the play unfolded, and if we then accept the play as a mere fiction, which implies that it carries more symbolic meaning than factual.