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Thersites fulfills the role that a fool, or clown, plays in many of Shakespeare’s other works. That said, this Greek’s status in the war isn’t entirely clear. He is by no means a soldier, as we see in his cowardly evasions on the battlefield in the play’s final act. Yet he also isn’t a slave, since he isn’t bound to the service of any one master. Instead, he seems to roam throughout the Greek camp, disparaging everything and everyone with his characteristic foul mouth. Although he’s a minor character who never participates directly in the action, Thersites is important for his incisive commentary on the play’s major events. His critique is already pointed and all-encompassing early in the play, as when he declaims: “Here is such patchery, such juggling, and such knavery. All the argument is a whore and a cuckold, a good quarrel to draw emulous factions and bleed to death on” (2.3.76–79). While drawing attention to the manipulative trickery afoot in the Greek camp, Thersites also decries the war as little more than a bloody “quarrel” instigated by a “whore” (i.e., Helen) and a “cuckold” (i.e., Menelaus). Thersites remains on message to the very end: “Lechery, lechery, still wars and lechery!” (5.2.226).
