After the Prologue announces that expectation is "tickling skittish spirits on one and other side," the scene soon opens with the indecent Pandarus trifling with the famous epic names, as he taps them lightly with his battledore to keep up his little game, which is to get Troilus thoroughly involved with Cressida: "An her hair were not somewhat darker than Helen's (well, go to), there were no more comparison between the women;" then the puppy says, "I will not dispraise your sister Cassandra's wit." Think of the jaunty go-between thus estimating the terrible prophetess of the Agamemnon, while he is only whetting Troilus's passion for Cressida, and devising means to bring them together. For this is meant to travesty the rape of Helen, which was the motive of the siege. The play begins by making incontinence a very important business, and thus ridiculous. As Thersites says, "All the argument is a cuckold, and war and lechery confound all."
Subsequently Cressida, at a wink from the Greek Diomedes, passes out of the keeping of her Trojan lover, thus making the politics as light as her love. And the scenes where Pandarus lickerishly plans the assignation, and rallies Cressida afterwards, are so purposely broad that every pretence of sentiment is emptied out of the play; the vulgarity becomes so conspicuous that the fighting itself is infected with it and runs into parody. The reader need only turn to the interjectional soliloquies of Thersites, which supply to every mock-heroic incident a very free translation, to perceive that there was an intention in the co-laborers upon this play to make all such famous court-manners and their quarrels seem ridiculous.
Thersites is Shakspeare himself in a cynic masquerade, that he may watch the whole game and be privy to the monstrous immorality. Achilles hangs back from fighting the Trojans, not in anger at the slight of Agamemnon, but rather because he has a secret understanding with one of Priam's daughters. Instead of maintaining consistent political attitudes, almost everybody is carrying on some private transaction of this kind, and the great heroes scramble like boys in a shower of comfits. Pandarus, the disgraceful old uncle of Cressida, who brought her and Troilus together in the same spirit which gave Helen to Paris, and back again coolly to her proper husband, is left at the close of the play to bewail the whole bad issue of the Homeric morals: "A goodly medicine for mine aching bones! O world, world, world! Thus is the poor agent despised. O traitors and bawds, how earnestly are you set a' work, and how ill requited!"