Shakespeare and the Early Modern Self 171
is superior to Achilles in the contention that matters most here in
this play— the exchange of vile wit.
Achilles and Patroclus depart and on come Agamemnon and
Menelaus. “Here’s Agamemnon,” Thersites informs the crowd, with
whom the playwright seems to believe he’s formed a confederation,
“an honest fellow enough and one that loves quails; but he has
not so much brain as earwax” (V.i.51–53). As to Menelaus, Ther-
sites says, “I care not to be the louse of a lazar” a parasite on a leper,
he says, “so I were not Menelaus” (V.i.65–66).
By the middle of the last act, the play’s spirit is fully the spirit of
Thersites; he has come to dominate matters entirely. “Lechery,
lechery,” he chants, “still wars and lechery! Nothing else holds
fashion. A burning devil take them” (V.ii.194–196). But it is not
merely that there is one infected character at the center of events.
It’s also that the spirit of Thersites seems to be at the heart of the
composition of the play. When it is time for Hector to die, Achilles
does not face him alone on the fi eld as he does in Homer. Instead
he allows his Myrmidons to surround the Trojan hero and slaughter
him; the mob pounces on him all at once. It is outright murder, not
a duel between matched warriors. “When I have the bloody Hector
found,” Achilles tells his men, “empale him with your weapons
round about” (V.vii.4–5). And they do. One understands that in a
recent production, Achilles draws an anachronistic revolver and
shoots Hector without warning, which is a fair enough interpreta-
tion of Shakespeare’s designs.
In Troilus and Cressida Shakespeare attempts to pull the cover
off Homer. He reveals his heroes to be not warriors with ideals, but
Selves of the lowest order. What makes them so bad is that, having
basic animal natures like all other men, they pretend other wise.
They do not know their own capacity for corruption, so besotted
are they with their ideals and their images. They are without internal