"When Viola gives Feste a coin in Twelfth Night, he begs another: ‘I would play Lord Pandarus of Phrygia, sir, to bring a Cressida to this Troilus….’ (III.i.51-52). Feste’s remark makes explicit what is in Troilus and Cressida a perhaps surprising subtext: Shakespeare’s play about the long-gone Heroic Age is obsessed with decidedly contemporary, mercantile issues of currency, trade, and valuation. More specifically, both its principal female characters are coded as public yardsticks of value who, like Malynes’s publica mensura, money, are nevertheless themselves subject to revaluation in the course of foreign exchange. The play’s concern with value has attracted considerable attention from scholars, who have often viewed Shakespeare as offering a proplectic Hobbesian vision of market economy. Troilus and Cressida’s ruminations on value, however, couched in the contradictory terms of pathological discourse torn between exogenous and endogenous etiologies of disease, resonate much more closely with the language, concerns, and confusions of Malyne’s Canker of England’s Commonwealth."
— Jonathan Gil Harris, Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism, and Disease in Shakespeare’s England
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