Despite their different values, the Homeric and chivalric ideals of heroism both depend similarly on definitive perspectives of evaluation, action, and individuality. This is why the lens of heroism is the most effective lens through which to analyze Troilus and Cressida as a textual and thematic palimpsest. Obviously, competing versions of heroism have contradictory ideals. As Bruce Smith observes, “A man cannot be the chivalrous knight and the impertinent jockey or the titanic hero and the merchant prince at the same time – or at least he cannot be comfortably so.” The legend of Troy produced in the medieval and Renaissance collective consciousness an original basis for literary tropes and heroic models. Characters such as Achilles, Ajax, and Hector become synonymous with various types of masculinity and heroism, and the titular characters of Troilus and Cressida have cultural resonance as archetypal lovers, a moralized and gendered concept, who are true or false in their own ways. they swear to each other. The show dialogues with the public's collective memory, reconfiguring known myths so that they are self-referential and distorted. Troilus and Cressida is the Trojan War inverted, the character of Achilles, or Helen, seen as reflected in a funfair mirror. They are at once themselves and (potentially poor) imitations of themselves (a point made in Odysseus's criticism of Patroclus in Act 1, Scene 3). Edward L. Hart states that the play is a dramatic question, posed by Shakespeare to himself: "What would happen if you wrote a play in which all values ​​are reversed, a play in which the mirror held up to life reflects a 'not a positive image? The very nature of these characters as archetypes further emphasizes the effect of Shakespeare's particular modeling in a way that destabilizes them.