ABSTRACT
While several of Shakespeare's plays seem to comment on the Poetomachia, only one of these, Troilus and Cressida, seems directly involved in the plays, including the strong doses of railing that characterize the majority of Poet's War plays. The lack of any significant female presence in most of the Poetomachia plays reflects a conscious displacement of feminine authority and influence. The Poet's War playwrights use alternate myth of male-male parthenogenesis to create an aesthetic space of experimentation for themselves and for theater in the interstices between fantasies of self-indulgent originality and the more authoritative, epic works of writers who claim inspiration from a feminine muse. In Troilus and Cressida, however, the character that comes closest to this depiction is not the educated poet figure of the Poet's War plays, but rather the abject slave and player-like fool, Thersites.
