In the false economy of war in the epic, human bodies are a commodity. Shakespeare, with Troilus and Cressida, reveals the grotesque and the mundane in the legend of the Trojan War. In the epic retellings of this ten year war, the world created is stagnant, without capitalism or production, without cultural exchange or growth. The Greeks remain camped outside the walls, and the Trojans within. Bodies become the only mediator of value, and are digested in various ways.

To digest: to divide and dispose; to disperse; to classify; to prepare food in the stomach; to suppurate. Many ways of seeing the word can be read into the human economy of Troilus and Cressida.

The first time digest appears in the text after the Prologue is in Act II Scene 2, when Priam reads the latest (and long familiar) pronouncement from the Greek camp: “‘Deliver Helen, and all damage else– / As honor, loss of time, travail, expense, / Wounds, friends, and what else dear that is consumed / In the hot digestion of this cormorant war — / Shall be struck off.’” (3-7). War is a consumer: it digests nations into individual bodies and then into their component parts. But this mode of thought is immediately shifted by Hector to the value of a body outside the battlefield. What is Helen’s worth? How does one weigh her against the thousands of dead? (II.2.17-25).

So far we have bodies divided and disposed by war, classified and evaluated against other bodies. In the Greek camp, we have Ulysses, Machiavellian, assigning strategic value to the life and death of “blockish Ajax.” Have him draw the random lottery to face Hector: if he wins and lives, fire up Achilles; if he loses and dies, he was never their best.

Bodies are also the only source of entertainment. In Act I Scene 2, Cressida from the wall remarks on the return of the Trojan soldiers. Each man she classifies, for her own diversion, while Pandarus prompts her to favorably consider Troilus. She measures him against Paris and Hector, breaking him down into component parts such as complexion, his smile, his youth, his strength, his bravery. There’s sincerity in this conversation—in Pandarus’s designs; in Cressida’s affection—but much of it on her part reads as just sport.

In the Greek camp, in an imperfect parallel, Achilles battles boredom and “pageants” the other Greeks, dressing Patroclus up as Nestor, Agamemnon, and mocking their persons. In that act of digestion, he also spreads dissent through the camp, and begins to break down the walls of degree, hierarchy, “order.”

The final, most obvious, commodification of bodies is in the act of exchange. Cressida for Antenor. Her position in either camp is tenuous. In Troy, she’s the daughter of a traitor. In the Greek camp, her value disappears the moment she appears: they have appeased her father. Is it any surprise then that she seeks protection the only way she can earn it from Diomedes? In another example, that passes more quietly and subtly, Paris treats his great love Helen as another object of exchange when he sends her at the end of Act III Scene 1 to “disarm” the great Hector…

There are of course more examples. If As You Like It is wish-fulfillment, Troilus and Cressida seeks to expose the ugly reality underlying power (in and out of the epic): it’s always built upon other bodies. As fodder for war. Value housed in the bodies of women. Entertainment extracted only in the classification, valuation and manipulation (in Ulysses’ case with Troilus) of other bodies.

Scenes like Cressida’s arrival in the Greek camp, passed around to be kissed, fondled, mocked by them—skin-crawling reading—call into attention that that is her role in the entirety of the play: a pawn handed between men, kissed and fondled on both sides of the Trojan wall.

This is a play to be digested, the Prologue warns. Maybe it means scenes like the above, that will be hard to stomach. Maybe it anticipates that viewers will walk away repulsed by what they have witnessed made of a legend canonized into British history.

Maybe, on a more meta-level, it reflects one final consumption. Maybe the play understands itself and the figures it resurrects as commodities to be digested, classified, broken down into component parts and reprocessed by its audience. And it resolves to deny their wish-fulfillment not in tragedy but in satire; harder to swallow, but once swallowed, harder to dismiss.