ABSTRACT
In Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare famously highlights the way the social economies of heroic war depend upon the traffic in women. Troilus first worries about how Cressida is being 'handled' in Pandarus' discourse, suggesting something illicit and incestuous about his role in play that is confirmed when he ends by drawing attention to his own probable venereal disease in the play's final moments. The homosocial relationships that usually involve an objectified woman and support the heroism of war are twice complicated here by the suggestion that one such triangle involves competition for Troilus between Cressida and Pandarus himself and another involves competition between Cressida and Helen. The blazon, a decidedly high-brow genre taken from Petrarchan and courtly love traditions, is exactly the kind of reified model of desire and agency. The play also self-consciously critiques the scattered descriptions of Cressida's body by comparing the dismemberment that is at symbolic core of the blazon's praises to the literal dismemberments of war.
