ABSTRACT
Act l's third scene opens with the indecorous Grecian King-General errantly orating to his world-upside-down court. Amidst this scene's reflections of Grecian disorder are Ulysses' report to their leaders of Patroclus' mimetic derision. Act II opens with the disorder of the Greeks that Ulysses' degree-speech had in the previous scene reproved. Here, Thersites is pummelled by Ajax, 'mind' beaten by brute body: stupidity misrules 'wit'. II.ii, among the Trojans, displays logic stood on its head, reason cast out, the defender of reason and law Hector qualifying the 'way of truth' (ll.ii.189) and joining the party of unreason. II.iii exhibits the mock-exaltation of Ajakes. III.i presents a postlude of the legendary great lovers, Helen and Paris, with a bored Queen Helen seducing an effete Pandar to 'perform'. III.ii preposterously enacts a 'betrothal' officiated, not by a priest, but by a Pandar. V.ii exhibits private misrule: a young woman's displacing a man, with a Trojan prince's public dishonour by a Grecian rival.2 V.vii and V.viii act out chivalric misrule: massed Myrmidons impaling the solitary Hector, himself (within II.ii) law's champion. In misrule's inversion of body and mind, body takes over, with its functions, appetites, and desires. Where 'reason [panders] will' (H, III.iv.88), Pandar is the inverted 'reason' of Troilus' will.
