Troilus and Cressida

Troilus

Troilus is Priam's youngest warrior son, expected to fight but too distracted by desire to keep his heart in the field. He confesses to Pandarus that he is 'weaker than a woman's tear,' sighing at his father's table and burying his grief in a smile so Hector won't see it. His longing sets the play's romantic engine running, and his impatience with delay — the grinding, bolting, leavening of Pandarus's cake metaphor — defines the anxious middle act.

Cressida

Cressida trades barbs with her uncle Pandarus while carefully refusing to admit she favors Troilus, defending herself with wit, secrecy, and a mask. She mocks Helen's praise of his complexion and insists Troilus is simply himself, not Hector — a coolness that makes her eventual yielding feel hard-won. Her guardedness matters because it turns the courtship into a duel of language, and because her father's defection to the Greeks already hangs over her position in Troy.

Pandarus

Pandarus bustles between the lovers, extolling Troilus's dimpled smile, his chin, his valor, until even Cressida tells him to be quiet. He speaks in food and baking metaphors — grinding, bolting, kneading, cooling — as if love were a cake that must not burn. His relentless chattering drives the courtship forward and gives the play its name for go-betweens, making him both comic engine and uneasy witness to what he arranges.

Hector

Hector is the pillar of Troy, the man whose name Cressida invokes as the standard against which all others are measured. Struck down by Ajax the day before, he is 'kept fasting and waking' by the shame, and Pandarus warns he will 'lay about him' when he next takes the field. His pride and prowess anchor the Trojan side of the war, and his courtesy toward the Greek lords — including his wary exchange with Ulysses — shows a nobility the play will steadily test.

Ulysses

Ulysses moves through the Greek camp diagnosing its sickness — pride, faction, and the sulking of Achilles — and prescribing order as the cure. He trades prophecies with Hector about Troy's coming fall, then turns his analysis on Achilles, arguing that a man only knows himself through others' eyes. His rhetorical power and appetite for manipulation make him the play's chief architect of Greek strategy, and the early-middle war council scenes belong largely to him.

Achilles

Achilles has withdrawn from battle, and the Greek lords — Agamemnon, Nestor, Menelaus, Ajax — walk past him with pointed indifference. He feels his greatness slipping and reads his own decline in their cold looks, musing that 'greatness, once fall'n out with fortune, must fall out with men too.' His wounded pride and refusal to fight paralyze the Greek cause, and his strange, hungry scrutiny of Hector at the feast signals the danger he still represents.