understand the workings of his own emotions, in the middle of an adolescent infatuation, more in love with love and his image of Cressida than the real woman herself. He displays a mixture of idealism about eternally faithful lovers and of realism, condemning Hector's "vice of mercy". His concept of love involves both a desire for immediate sexual gratification and a belief in eternal faithfulness. He also displays a mixture of constancy, (in love and supporting the continuation of war) and inconsistency (changing his mind twice in the first scene on whether to go to battle or not). More a Hamlet than a Romeo, by the end of the play his illusions of love shattered and Hector dead, Troilus might show signs of maturing, recognising the nature of the world, rejecting Pandarus and focusing on revenge for his brother's death rather than for a broken heart or a stolen horse. The novelist and academic Joyce Carol Oates, on the other hand, sees Troilus as beginning and ending the play in frenzies – of love and then hatred. For her, Troilus is unable to achieve the equilibrium of a tragic hero despite his learning experiences, because he remains a human-being who belongs to a banal world where love is compared to food and cooking and sublimity cannot be achieved.Troilus and Cressida's sources include Chaucer, Lydgate, Caxton and Homer, but there are creations of Shakespeare's own too and his tone is very different. Shakespeare wrote at a time when the traditions of courtly love were dead and when England was undergoing political and social change. Shakespeare's treatment of the theme of Troilus' love is much more cynical than Chaucer's, and the character of Pandarus is now grotesque. Indeed, all the heroes of the Trojan War are degraded and mocked. Troilus' actions are subject to the gaze and commentary of both the venal Pandarus and of the cynical Thersites who tells us: ...That dissembling abominable varlet Diomed has got that same scurvy, doting, foolish knave's sleeve of Troy there in his helm. I would fain see them meet, that that same young Trojan ass, that loves the whore there, might send that Greekish whoremasterly villain with the sleeve back to the dissembling luxurious drab of a sleeveless errand... The action is compressed and truncated, beginning in medias res with Pandarus already working for Troilus and praising his virtues to Cressida over those of