First, Shakespeare limns the traditional picture of Cupid, blindfolded, winged, dimpled, with bow in hand; then Shakespeare dislimns Cupid, turns him into a sort of gleam or libido that can flash from any eye, or into some high shapelessness. In Ibsen's Peer Gynt (1867), Peer runs into the Bøyg, an insubstantial, incomprehensible presence that bars his way—“neither dead nor alive … mist … and slime. Shapeless, too … it's like running into a nest of sleepy bears.” As Cupid loses his normal iconography, he begins to grow runny, gluey, shadowed, more mood than physical entity—a vague thickness, a vagrant arousal, a trauma within the dream, an engorgement heightened by a yawn and a shiver.

On the highest level of the play, the fairy world, most of the characters can be understood as avatars of Cupid. Best conforming to the traditional picture is, of course, Puck, a boyish sprite, mischievousness personified. He even seems to identify himself with the character of Cupid: “Cupid is a knavish lad, / Thus to make poor females mad” (3.2.440–41), he says, as Hermione and Helena, at their wits’ end, fall asleep; but of course Puck himself is the knavish lad who drove Hermione and Helena to distraction by squirting his love potions in the wrong eyes. Puck, however, is in no way confined to the shape of a boy: he's disconcertingly omniform. He can neigh in the likeness of a filly to beguile a bean-fed horse (2.1.45); he can assume the shape of a crab apple, to bob against a gossip's lips and “on her withered dewlap pour the ale” (2.1.50); and he can pretend to be a stool on which the “wisest aunt” thinks to rest: “Then slip I from her bum, down topples she … and falls into a cough” (2.1.51–53). Puck is the god of dribble glasses, whoopee cushions, hand buzzers, rubber spiders, and plastic vomit; as the Proteus of the novelty item, he can transform himself into any device for provoking embarrassment and derision. If Puck were a character in Othello he would turn himself into a handkerchief.