Why, she is a pearl. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay whose price has launched more than a thousand ships and turned crowned kings into merchants. (2.2.81-3)Shakespeare's world of Troilus and Cressida makes no clear distinction between Greeks and Trojans. Although the Greek camp is a makeshift set of tents pitched on the shores of Troy, and Trojan society is the court palace of Priam and his sons, both societies value the same ideas and goals: honor in men, beauty, and faithfulness in women. , as revealed casually through appearances and deeds. The inadequacy of such measures of value, their inability to be absolute, and their inability to be made known, translate into the incestuous and consanguineous world of Troilus and Cressida, where war is waged as between brothers and sisters: full of petty rivalries, meaningless, repetitive trading between camps and conspicuous wandering back and forth in place of real conflict. Unable to live or act without considerations of value, the cast of Troilus and Cressida create and operate in their own fallen world. Troilus and Cressida immediately open up into this world of judgments and evaluations. Troilus' mini-coat of arms in appreciation of Cressida "Her eyes, her hair, her cheek, her gait, her voice (1.1.56)" is soon followed by Pandarus's attempt to elevate Troilus' position to the Cressida's eyes: You have eyes, don't you? do you know what a man is? Birth, beauty, good form, speech, manhood, learning, kindness, virtue, youth, liberality, and the like, are not the salt and salt that season a man? (1.2.262-266). The humor in the play's opening scenes arises not from the gap between how women are celebrated and how men are, but rather from Shakespeare's demonstration that the modes of evaluation are in fact the same; both reduce men and women to objects of desire. In the opening scenes of the opera, the lovers do not confront each other except with the mediation of Pandarus, who first undertakes to sell Cressida to Troilus (already a love-sick buyer), and then to sell Troilus to Cressida (who is simply playing hard to get), through a series of confrontations with other lovers and actors in their tightly scripted world. Pandarus's role in Troilus and Cressida, mediating action by attempting to mediate "or provoke" desire, is problematic. His exchanges with both Troilus and Cressida are embarrassing not only because he is the uncle of a woman of good family reduced to the role of fool or intermediary, but because his praise sometimes seems to border on the unnatural and incestuous. . In Cressida's eulogy, for example, Pandarus cannot help but twice insert the admission that she is his niece, which forces us to take the dialogue uneasily even if we hadn't intended it that way. For my part he is my kinsman, says Pandarus; I would not praise her, as they call her (1.1.45-47). A few lines later, she complains again: because she is my relative, so she is not as fair as Helen. If she weren't related to me, she would be as beautiful on Fridays as Elena is on Sundays (1.1.78-80). In speaking of Troilus to Cressida one scene later, Pandarus returns to the theme of illicit admiration. Unable to exalt Troilus as much as he would like himself, he postulates a non-existent female relationship to satisfy his desire for him: if I had a sister a grace, or a daughter a goddess, he should make his choice (1.2.244 -46). Even though this is all part of the show, the business side of love, Pandarus still helps create the claustrophobic, ingrown atmosphere of the show. Taken together,these scenes put Pandarus beyond the role of intermediary to seem not only the champion of the young lovers but their pimp, something he will realize at the end of the play. In his concluding remarks, Pandarus, the poor despised agent, identifies himself with the ruffians and flesh-dealers (5.10.36, 46). If the society of Troilus and Cressida is ill and the actors in this society are brothers and sisters of the door trade, Pandarus has voluntarily held the door open so that others may pass through (5.10.51). But he is not alone in this accusation, which is symptomatic of the undifferentiated society of the work. It reaches the highest levels, as seen wonderfully through Odysseus' humiliating treatment of Cressida upon her arrival at the Greek camp. After the Greek general Agamemnon receives Cressida with a kiss, Odysseus "without apparent purpose" extends the reception to all the other Greeks, from ancient Nestor to the cuckolded Menelaus: Yet the kindness is peculiar. / It would be better if they kissed her in general (4.5.20-21). Ulysses places himself at the end of this series of kisses, but when his turn comes, he refuses the generosity induced by Cressida. Why then, for Venus' sake, give me a kiss, / When Helen is handmaiden again, and hers, says Odysseus, imposing on the kiss an impossible condition, Helen's stained virginity (4.5.49-50). Odysseus, it seems, sets up this scenario to expose Cressida as a woman suited to his conception of her, so that he can then judge her as she dates Diomedes: Shame, shame! There is a language in his eye, his cheek, his lip; no, his foot speaks. His unbridled spirits watch every joint and movement of his body. (4.5.54-57)Odysseus, at his lowest moment, also turns out to be an agent in the door trade. Ulysses' verses are also significant for another reason. When he asks that Cressida be kissed in general, rather than in particular, Ulysses offers the reader one of the major dichotomies of the work, that of the gap between what is general "absolute or unified" and what is particular, contingent or private. It is appropriate (as much as something like this can be appropriate) that Agamemnon, as general of the Greeks, kisses Cressida; it is not appropriate for all men to follow suit. By depriving the Greek camp of even this small level of hierarchy in command, Ulysses further contributes to the pervasive lack of hierarchy in all aspects of the world of the play. Ironically, the compulsion of the characters of Troilus and Cressida to judge and evaluate the value of people and actions ultimately leads to a non-hierarchical society in which everyone is low and equally low. The beautiful Helen flirts shamelessly with Pandarus in 3.1, her only appearance in the play, and Pandarus' insinuations extend not only to Helen and Cressida but also to Cassandra, Priam's mad prophetic daughter and not so much a traditional sex object. As he says to Troilus before being interrupted: I will not despise the wit of thy sister Cassandra, but" (1.1.48-9). The role of the pimp, as shown by Pandarus in Troilus and Cressida, is an unnecessary social role because the wish is not to be carried out "through Pandarus's attempts to increase the wealth of both Cressida and Troilus" or mediated. People do not need a pimp because they have their own private desires and decisions that can be acted upon in their time is perhaps what gives Troilus and Cressida its trace of tragedy: the world of the game is hostile to any sort of true union between Troilus and Cressida because it insists on transforming private and subjective evaluations into public and absolute ones: the discourse of Ulysses in 1.3, advocating the specialty of government and the observance of rank, priority and place in war as in? (5.10.39-40).