From the ancient comedies of Aristophanes to Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, war and satire are natural allies. Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida belongs in this unruly literary history and is a play so bitter, so strange, and so unsparingly satirical that it’s often slipped through the cracks of performance history. Troilus and Cressida shows us a snippet of the Trojan War, both its lesser known Trojan lovers, Troilus and Cressida, and its better known ‘heroes’: Achilles, Hector, Ulysses, Ajax, Paris, and Helen. Yet amongst these heroes is a full-blown send-up of how war is packaged, sold, and mythologised, then and now.

Satire in Shakespeare’s time was a dangerous business. In the late 1590s, verse satire was flourishing as a genre — so much so that it was banned in 1599 under what’s known as the Bishop’s Ban, just a few years before Troilus and Cressida was likely written. Theatrical satire narrowly escaped the broad ban, since satire was not a dramatic genre in its own right, but instead might find a place in both the comedies and tragedies of the era. Yet as always censorship meant that any political or religious satire on stage needed to be oblique. Shakespeare could not openly mock Elizabethan wars or lords, but by retelling the Trojan War, replete with war heroes and glamourous lovers, he could expose the machinery of conflict and celebrity alike.

Take one of the most revealing scenes in the play: the moment when Cressida and her uncle, Pandarus, watch the Trojan warriors return from battle in Act 1 Scene 2. The scene should be heroic with warriors parading home and wounds gleaming as symbols of honour. Instead, Shakespeare turns it into farce. Pandarus narrates each warrior’s arrival with the zeal of a gossip columnist, urging Cressida to “mark Troilus above the rest” (188). But when Troilus finally enters, Cressida dismisses him as a “sneaking fellow,” and Pandarus at first mistakes him for another soldier, Deiphobus, before hastily backtracking and piling on exaggerated praise of his “bloodied” sword and “hacked” helm (232-240). How singular can Troilus be if he is so easily confused? The grand parade is deflated, and the supposed glory of war becomes an overblown pageant. This is satire not just of the warriors themselves but of the culture of hero-worship that props them up.

Other moments in the play are more explicitly satirical in their venom. Thersites, a servant-soldier who describes herself as “a rascal, a scurvy railing knave, a very filthy rogue”, most clearly embodies the warlike satirical spirit that the 1599 Bishop’s Ban targeted. In one of the works banned, Joseph Hall’s 1598 Virgidemiarum [A Harvest of Blows] The three last bookes of byting Satyres, satire is imagined in violent terms:

The Satyre should be like the Porcupine,
That shoots sharp quills out in each angry line,
And woundst the blushing cheeke, and fiery eye,
Of him that heares and readeth guiltily

Satire wounds. It is like a weapon in battle, or a sharp-quilled porcupine. Shakespeare plays on this description in an interaction between Thersites and her superior, Ajax, using the more archaic term for porcupine, a ‘porpentine’:

THERSITES         Thou art proclaimed a fool, I think.

AJAX                    Do not, porpentine, do not. My fingers itch.

THERSITES         I would thou didst itch from head to foot, and I had the scratching of thee; I                                       would make thee the loathsomest scab in Greece. (2.1.25-8)

Thersites is the wounding porcupine, yet she also debases the metaphor further, offering to scratch at Ajax’s body so much he will become a ‘scab’. Thersites’ foul language, scatalogical and grossly bodily puns, and vicious contempt mark her out as the play’s chief satirist. Yet what aligned Thersites so closely with satire (and war) in the eyes of Elizabethan audiences was her willingness to attack authority. To punch up. In Shakespeare’s Trojan War, there are no idealised heroes, instead all are equal targets for Thersites’ “mastic jaws” (1.3.77).

Shakespeare also stages satire more subtly in the councils of war. The Greek leaders complain that Achilles now “Grows dainty of his worth and in his tent / Lies mocking [their] designs” (1.3.149-50), while scheming Ulysses plots to elevate “dull brainless Ajax” (389) as a foil. The Greek war effort, rather than a campaign of glory, is depicted as a petty popularity contest full of showy oration masking duplicitous plotting. Meanwhile the Trojans question the very basis of the war. Hector wonders why they persist in defending Helen: “If we have lost so many tenths of ours / To guard a thing not ours… What merit’s in that reason which denies / The yielding of her up?” (2.1.21-25).

Ulysses diagnoses the war’s stagnation as the collapse of “degree” — the Elizabethan ideal of order and hierarchy, be it between the planets or between social groups on earth. “O, when degree is shaked,” he laments, “the enterprise is sick” (1.3.101-2). For him, war fails when men no longer know their place in the ladder of power. Hector, however, strikes a different note as he meditates on the worth and “value” of protecting Helen and continuing the war:

HECTOR     Brother, she is not worth what she doth cost
The keeping.

TROILUS    What’s aught but as ’tis valued?

HECTOR     But value dwells not in particular will;
It holds his estimate and dignity
As well wherein ’tis precious of itself
As in the prizer. ’Tis mad idolatry
To make the service greater than the god;
And the will dotes that is attributive
To what infectiously itself affects
Without some image of th’ affected merit. (2.2.54-64)

Where Ulysses is doggedly attached to hierarchy, reminding the Greek council that power consumes all, Hector is more cynical and thoughtful. His argument dismantles Troilus’s claim that value is simply a matter of perception — “what’s aught but as ’tis valued?” — by exposing the irrationality of worshipping what one already desires, be that a country, city, or person. To Hector, value has to exist beyond such desire, otherwise it is “mad idolatry,” the dangerous inflation of a cause until the service itself becomes greater than the thing supposedly served. His speech recognises that men go to war not because objects or people are inherently precious, but because desire distorts judgment, turning the unworthy into idols.

What both Ulysses and Hector do, then, is bring the arbitrariness of war into focus. For Ulysses, war collapses without the scaffolding of hierarchy; for Hector, war collapses because human beings misplace value in the first place. Both perspectives sharpen the play’s satirical edge. Satire thrives in such conditions, because it feeds on social discord, on the exposure of faulty logic, and on puncturing inflated claims to worth. If foul-mouthed Thersites can mock her superiors, and if Shakespeare can depict the great heroes of the ancient world as so bitterly, imperfectly human, then the audience, too, is invited to reflect on at the hollowed-out machinery of war and its ‘heroes’.

Troilus and Cressida, directed by Owen Horsley, plays from 26 September – 26 October 2025 in the Globe Theatre.

FINIS.