SOURCE: "Violence, Love, and Gender in Romeo and Juliet and Troilus and Cressida" in Love 's Argument: Gender Relations in Shakespeare, The University of North Carolina Press, 1984, pp. 110-22.

Below, Novy suggests that the apparently comedic, love-centered world of Troilus and Cressida is in fact lust-centered, and that it ultimately resembles a tragedy in its violent focus on war and the male characters' brutal rejection of "womanish" ways.

.. . In Troilus and Cressida, the private world of the lovers contrasts with the military world less than usual in Shakespeare because both are so satirically treated. In both worlds we see self-centeredness, competition, mercantile values, appetite.² The war has stopped in the first part of the play, and the idleness of the soldiers and the "open" sexuality of the women, both satirized, make the genders less polarized than usual. But when the war revives and Cressida is exchanged, she submits...