A Midsummer Night's Dream is a stratified play, a lamination of planes: from bottom to top, the plane of Bottom and the mechanicals; the plane of the Athenian lovers; the plane of Theseus and Hippolyta; and the plane of Oberon and the fairies. Above the top plane there lies a single manipulating presence, a cosmic mechanism for generating randomness: not Fortuna; not her sister Fame; but Cupid. Indeed, the whole fairy plane behaves as a complicated surface for inscribing and explaining the will of Cupid, whose vagrant cupidity plays everywhere.

Cupid was a powerful literary presence in Shakespeare's time, especially in the realm of comic gallantry. For example, in Ben Jonson's “A Celebration of Charis in Ten Lyrick Peeces” (ca. 1623), the poet, pursuing the lovely Charis, begs Cupid's assistance; the impatient poet even unclouds blind Cupid's vision, in order to move matters along; but Cupid, appalled by the sight of the fifty-yearold poet—no very fine specimen of manhood—runs away. The poet then picks up the bow and arrows that Cupid left behind, hoping to shoot Charis himself; but one glance from Charis's eyes strikes the poet like lightning, paralyzing him:

Beard, wrinkles, sweat, belly pooching over the belt—this creature is only a coarse simulacrum of the god. Shakespeare was also fond of this rhythm of surrogacy: Cupid makes few personal appearances in Shakespeare's work, but instead operates through a complex gang of vicars. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, the boyish, incompetent Puck is the most obvious of Cupid's demiurges, but not the only one: almost any character, no matter how young or old or high or low or polished or rough or dignified or ridiculous, can find himself an erotic cynosure, a parody Cupid. Cupid cupidifies, makes flagrant, what he touches. Every act of falling in love becomes a universal promotion of sexuality.