War in Shakespeare's Plays | Lorraine Helms (essay date 1989)
Lorraine Helms (essay date 1989)
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...
[The entire page is 6990 words long]
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