SOURCE: “‘War and Lechery Confound All’: Identity and Agency in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida,” in Strands Afar Remote: Israeli Perspectives on Shakespeare, edited by Avraham Oz, Associated University Presses, 1998, pp. 87-112.

In the following essay, Yogev observes that the courtly and chivalric codes found in earlier versions of the story of Troilus and Cressida are intentionally subverted in Shakespeare's play into opportunities for male sexual aggression and exploitation.

Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida has occasioned a number of critical discussions of the psychodynamics of identity formation as well as poststructuralist accounts of how its powerfully ambiguous and enigmatic language subverts identity.¹ To my knowledge, however, these two approaches have not been combined to analyze the way in which language and “heroic” activity at once constitute and subvert the identities of the protagonists in Shakespeare's bitter drama. Like Chaucer and Boccaccio before him, Shakespeare juxtaposes the martial plot of the...