Thersites

Play

Troilus and Cressida

Summary

The deformed Greek scold who provides the play's most corrosive commentary, reducing the entire Trojan War to its basest elements with gleeful malice. His cynicism is absolute and his abuse inexhaustible — he is used by Achilles and Ajax as a kind of licensed fool, but his vision of human motivation (all war and politics reducible to lust and appetite) gives the play its most nihilistic edge.

Notable Quotations

"All the argument is a whore and a cuckold; a good quarrel to draw emulous factions and bleed to death upon." *(II.iii)*

"Lechery, lechery; still wars and lechery; nothing else holds fashion." *(V.ii)*

Cross-references

• Troilus and Cressida — the play
• Tragedies
• character_achilles_tc — whose camp he haunts
• character_agamemnon — whose leadership he mocks
• character_ulysses — whose political schemes he undercuts with raw cynicism