COMEDY

52 COMIC IDENTITYShakespeare, fairies like Puck were styled as sinister demons who ‘stolechildren, dispensed sudden illnesses, destroyed crops and flocks andwere believed to live in hell’ (Laroque, 1993:22). The transformation ofPuck from demonic spirit to playful trickster is partly due to the fallingaway of superstitious belief, as well as the transposition of character typesfrom classical literature onto domestic writing. As Jonathan Gil Harriswrites, the supernatural characters of A Midsummer Night’s Dream are asyncretic blend of powerful yet for the most part benevolentspirits taken from the seemingly disparate domains of Greekmythology, courtly romance and village folklore; even…Puck is acomposite of ‘high’ and ‘low’, owing as much to Neoplatonicconceptions of Cupid as to the Robin Goodfellow of populartradition.(Harris, 1998:353–354)In the psychoanalytic system of Carl Jung, the trickster is a remnant ofan earlier state of consciousness before humanity had become fullycivilized. In Jung’s view ‘all mythical figures correspond to innerpsychic experiences and originally sprang from them’ (Jung, 1959, vol.9:256). Jung sees the cycles of tales that feature the trickster as a meansof narrating how ‘a higher level of consciousness has covered up a lowerone’ (Jung, 1959, vol. 9:266). Trickster narratives usually conclude withthe meddlesome actions of the protagonist coming to serve some usefulor illustrative purpose, as in the case of Coyote. As such, argues Jung,they mirror the development of human consciousness from a wilder andmore savage state to a state of relative sophistication. ‘The civilizingprocess begins with the framework of the trickster cycle itself, he writes.‘The marks of deepest unconsciousness fall away from him; instead ofacting in a brutal, savage, stupid, and senseless fashion, the trickster’sbehaviour towards the end of the cycle becomes quite useful andsensible’ (Jung, 1959, vol. 9: 266). Such is the trajectory of Puck, whoinitially serves as an agent of chaos, but is ultimately responsible forinducing Demetrius to love Helena and arranging the young couples inperfect symmetry, so that ‘Jack shall have Jill/Nought shall go ill; /Theman shall have his mare again, and all shall be well’ (Shakespeare,1989:3.2.461–3).While Jung thought of the trickster as the ‘shadow’ of a formerbeing, whose high visibility in narrative speaks of its refusal to becompletely dissolved into modern consciousness, structuralanthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss saw him as a symbolic agent who