Blooms Literary Themes - THE TRICKSTER.pdf - ymerleksi - home

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William Shakespeare
likeness of a fi lly foal” (2.1.44–46)—thereby displaying the relationship
between the trickster and (in the words of Robert Abrahams) the
“clown, fool, [and] jokester” (qtd. in Doty and Hynes, “Historical” 17)
as well as exhibiting another highly important feature of the archetypal
trickster: his talent as a shape-shifter (Hynes, “Mapping” 36–37).
In addition, like the classical trickster Hermes, Puck can often seem “a
ridiculous character” who appears “especially close to ordinary human
lives” (Doty, “A Lifetime”), as when he brags that “sometimes lurk
I in a gossip’s bowl / In very likeness of a roasted crab, / And when
she drinks, against her lips I bob, / And on her wither’d dewlap pour
the ale” (2.1.47–50). Puck here makes literal physical contact with
a woman near the very bottom of the Elizabethan social structure,
playing his typical tricks in a way that can almost be seen as “erotic
and relational” (Doty, “A Lifetime” 46) and that is certainly “playful”
and “clownlike” (Doty, “A Lifetime” 64). Indeed, Puck sounds very
much like a clown when he describes his entertaining deception of
“Th e wisest Aunt, telling the saddest tale,” who
Sometime for a three-foot stool mistaketh me;
Th en slip I from her bum, down topples she,
And ‘tailor’ cries, and falls into a cough;
And then the whole quire hold their hips and loff e
And waxen in their mirth, and neeze, and swear
A merrier hour was never wasted there. (2.1.51–57)
Such behavior exhibits, almost literally, the trickster’s skill as a “situation-invertor,”
able to “overturn” almost anything (Hynes, “Mapping”
37), as well as the trickster’s common associations with “symbolic
inversion” and his “close relationship to the feminine” (Doty, “A
Lifetime” 64). In view of that last trait, it hardly seems surprising
that Puck not only helps women with their housework (2.1.41) but
also deceives both a “gossip” (2.1.47) and an “aunt” (2.1.51) and even
turns himself into “a fi lly foal” (2.1.46). Indeed, his transformation of
himself into a female horse also links him with the “gender multiplicity”
that Doty sees as a highly common trait of many trickster
fi gures (“A Lifetime” 64).
In spite of Puck’s skill in (and enjoyment of ) deceptive trickery,
and despite his predilection for the kind of playful mischief that causes
women to spill ale on themselves and fall on their bums, Oberon