Thersites has taken center stage:

Thersites is a malevolent force, a type of primal hatred and pride, and what Shakespeare has done is to take the conventional character of the satirist and strip away his pretensions to being a moral healer and intensify his basic loathing of all mankind. In Thersites we are very close to those basic drives and outlook which give rise to satire, and which in this case are not redirected by any extraneous moral considerations or glossed over by any pretension to justice and honesty.4

The idea that the play subverts all prior moral certainties has meant that modern critics have been rather more sympathetic to the character of Cressida than their predecessors were. In a pioneering lecture, the Cambridge critic A. P. Rossiter suggested that

Cressida is not simply a little harlot; and, though admittedly “designing,” is too frail to stick to her design. Her passion is quite genuine … so is her grief at her separation from Troilus. Only nothing is deep rooted in her … Thersites has the last word on her; but she is only the feminine of the rest of them. They all fancy or pretend they are being or doing one thing, whereas they are shown up as something quite different: something which egoism, or lack of moral insight, prevents their recognizing.5

Around the same time, her strength of character was praised in Polish critic Jan Kott’s influential book, Shakespeare Our Contemporary:

Cressida is one of the most amazing Shakespearian characters … She is cynical, or rather would-be cynical … She is bitter and ironic. She is passionate, afraid of her passion and ashamed to admit it. She is even more afraid of feelings. She distrusts herself. She is our contemporary because of this self-distrust, reserve, and need of self-analysis. She defends herself by irony.6

The play as a whole is “our contemporary,” it has frequently been argued, because of its relentless exposure of the relativity of all values:

The association of fame and glory and the like with the rape of Helen, and the attempt to make that rape seem more glamorous by persisting in fighting for it, is recognized by Hector to be pure illusion … The Trojans choose the illusion of fame and glory, knowing it to be an illusion, and knowing that Helen herself is not the real motive for fighting.7

Masculine reputation is reduced to mere “opinion”:

Words such as “worthy,” “glory,” “fame,” “merit,” “esteem,” “estimate,” “estimation,” “value,” “cost,” “honour” are everywhere. And “opinion” occurs ten times, far more than in any other Shakespeare play. It is commonplace … that reputation, honor, fame, and all the rest depend on opinion. Opinion is what people say. In the matter of reputation, it is what other people say about you. One cannot have fame or glory by one’s own inward knowledge; it has to come from the mouths of others, not from within.8

With the breakdown of hierarchy that is the subject of this play, the consequences predicted by Ulysses … are exactly fulfilled: the traditional bonds that once defined human relations are replaced by “appetite … will and power” … Proper relationship is destroyed, and the ethics of the marketplace … govern men’s and women’s dealings with one another … The disturbance of the hierarchical order leaves the individual not autonomous and free, but bound to definition by relation of a different, more destructive sort. Deprived of the legitimate sanctions of hierarchy, the individual must create his or her own value, an appearance to please the beholding eye, in what is essentially a selling of the self.9

A related aspect of the play that has especially appealed to modern criticism has been its literary self-consciousness. Not only received moral values, but also received myths, stories, and literary characterizations are called into question:

The play also persistently calls attention to its intertextuality, its anachronicity, its dependence upon a prodigious literary and rhetorical legacy. Within Shakespeare’s dramatization of familiar legend, a vast encyclopedia of citation is embedded. The myth, the Matter of Troy, the classical topos, the set piece, the commonplace, the cliché, the name that has become a concept; references to books, texts, representations, figures of rhetoric—all these are on display as though to insist on the text’s derivative status.10

The ironic retelling of a familiar story undermines the preconceptions created by cultural tradition. Whereas previous versions of the Troy legend turned the story to ethical account, Shakespeare declined to do so. In his thoroughgoing work of demythologizing, the classical heroes fail to live up to their literary and historic identities:

The whole play carries an element of general parody in relation to the grand Homeric legend of the Trojan war, as the heroes of that are displayed in the fumbling and insecure postures of Shakespeare’s characters … Shakespeare also … establishes and exploits a dislocation of character from role, and a discontinuity between speech and action in, for example, the presentation of Ajax, or of Troilus, whose grand rhetoric as lover is comically exploded by the matter-of-fact practicality of Pandarus.11

Whereas classical culture had idealized male bonds and male bodies, Shakespeare’s play diminishes and sexualizes them:

What we see as Achilles stalks Hector, what we hear as he speaks, is a violent parody of a lover’s blazon [in which the body is itemized] … Seen in the terms that Achilles himself provides, the slaughter of Hector becomes an act of sexual consummation, a homosexual gang rape that Achilles and his Myrmidons carry out on their unarmed victim … Thersites derides this coupling of two males, not in moral terms, however, but in political terms. He sees it all as a matter of one man’s power over another. A “varlet” is primarily a social, not a moral, inferior. Patroclus deserves insults, not because he is morally wrong, but because he willingly accepts an unmanly, passive role: he is Achilles’ “masculine whore.”12

The evolution of critical responses to the play is clearly seen in changing attitudes to the two camps. For G. Wilson Knight, writing in the 1930s,

The Trojan party stands for human beauty and worth, the Greek party for the bestial and stupid elements of man, the barren stagnancy of intellect divorced from action, and the criticism which exposes these things with jeers. The atmospheres of the two opposing camps are thus strongly contrasted, and the handing over of Cressida to the Greeks … has thus a symbolic suggestion … Among [the Trojans] we find love and honour of parents, humour, conviviality, patriotism: all which are lacking among the Greeks.