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Act 4, Scene 5
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Troilus and Cressida, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
War
Love and Selfishness
Honor
Commodification of Women
Fate and Fortune
Summary
Analysis
In the Greek camp, Achilles swears to Patroclus that, although he’ll join the Greeks in honoring Hector at the feast on this night, in the morning he’ll run the Trojan prince through with his sword. The arrival of the ever-unpleasant Thersites cuts this conversation short. He hands Achilles a letter from the Trojan queen, Hecuba. While Achilles reads it, Thersites bitterly derides Patroclus, calling him Achilles’s male whore and a disease on humanity itself. Patroclus wants to protest, but doing so would mean acknowledging the names Thersites is calling him.
Over the course of the play, it’s become evident that Achilles is motivated by simple pride rather than a sense that the war fills a grander purpose or a sense of obedience and loyalty to his leaders. It seems that he is only capable of acting out of self-interest. This is true, too, when it comes to fulfilling his own carnal desires. Thersites’s barbed comments make it clear that Achilles and Patroclus are lovers—something that would have been anathema to the play’s original audience and that is clearly meant to disgust them. Further, Thersites’s words here contribute to the play’s jaded association of all sexual acts—even heterosexual ones—with filth and disease. In the play’s worldview, love and sex are as pointless as violence and as horrifying in their ability to bring out the worst in people.
Active
Themes
Hecuba’s letter reminds Achilles of the promise he made to her and her daughter, Polyxena (whom Achilles loves) end the war between the Greeks and the Trojans—a promise he intends to keep, despite his animus toward Hector. He and Patroclus withdraw.
Perhaps, this moment suggests, pride isn’t the only thing that motivates Achilles. Love and sex are powerful motivators of human action, too. But these desires aren’t necessarily nobler—after all, the war itself is the result of Paris kidnapping Helen at least in part to fulfill his own lust.
Active
Themes
Thersites is still standing there, bitterly cataloging the faults of the Greek generals and noting that sex and violence are the only real motivators of human activity, when Agamemnon, Menelaus, Ulysses, Nestor, Ajax, and Diomedes stumble past. They’ve gotten lost while escorting Hector and Troilus through the camp. Leaving Hector and the others to be entertained by Achilles and Patroclus, Agamemnon and Menelaus withdraw. When Diomedes quietly turns aside toward Calchas’s tent, Troilus and Ulysses follow, trailed in turn by Thersites.
Active
Themes
