SOURCE: Helms, Lorraine. “‘Still Wars and Lechery’: Shakespeare and the Last Trojan Woman.” In Arms and the Woman: War, Gender, and Literary Representation, edited by Helen M. Cooper, Adrienne Auslander Munich, and Susan Merrill Squier, pp. 25-42. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989.

In the following essay, Helms analyzes Shakespeare's treatment of male and female notions of war and honor in Troilus and Cressida.

Concidit virgo ac puer. Bellum peractum est. 

—Seneca, Troades

Throughout Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, Thersites' bitter cry echoes and reechoes: “Lechery, lechery, still wars and lechery; nothing else holds fashion” (5.2.194-95). It is a cry from which Shakespeare scholars long turned in disgust, dismissing Troilus and Cressida as vicious and cynical, a cruel misrepresentation of both Homer's heroic warriors and Chaucer's courtly lovers. For commentators who have turned to Troilus and Cressida in the aftermath of twentieth-century wars, the play has become a...