Where Cupid reigns, he creates his subjects in his own image: blind, juvenile, capricious, pricking, and unable to confine themselves to a single form, a single identity. The four Athenian lovers manifest the misshaping and transfiguring power of love in many ways. On one hand they hold to a fervent claim that love is stabilizing, fixative; they are eager to make eternal vows of fidelity. On the other hand, the actual texts of their oaths seem to mock the swearer: Hermia affirms to Lysander, “I swear to thee by Cupid's strongest bow” (1.1.169), but to mention Cupid seems to introduce a certain childish frivolity into the contract; and, most bizarrely of all, Hermia winds up swearing (as she ponders the perfidy of Aeneas), “By all the vows that ever men have broke” (1.1.175). The strength of my vow of love is just as great as the weakness of most people's vows of love— it's hard to paraphrase this without making it sound as if the oath's betrayal is built into the oath itself. The oath almost compels the event that it tries to avoid, by predicting that Lysander will treat Hermia as Aeneas treated Dido. An oath of eternal constancy in love seems most properly delivered with fingers crossed behind the back. Just as the sincerity of Romeo's devotion to Juliet can in no way be demonstrated through a study of Romeo's rhetoric—he said the same things to Rosaline—so there lurks equivocation, weaseliness, in all of love's verbal artifices, from sweet nothings to solemn oaths. (Long before Cupid's love juice officially meddled in human affairs, Demetrius behaved exactly like Romeo, losing interest in Helena and falling in love with Hermia.) Shakespeare often seems suspicious of any emotion that manifests itself through extravagant words: just as Cordelia's affection for Lear is genuine because it is expressed simply, without show, so the mere act of displacing love into rhetorical flourishes seems a compromise, a contamination. If I say that I’ll love you until the oceans are folded and hung up to dry and the stars go squawking like geese about the sky, I’m not carefully attending to the particularities of any future that you and I might share. Still, the sort of love associated with Cupid isn't a sober and prudent state of emotion; perhaps Cupid is most happily himself in hyperbole—freakish, tickly, giddy, teasing, faithless.