Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida

Perhaps influenced by Cormell Price’s essay on Shakespeare in the February issue of The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, this essay by William Fulford is the first in a series of essays on Shakespeare’s lesser-known plays. The two later essays in the series, one on Timon of Athens and one on Twelfth Night, were co-written with Annie Scott Hill (1835-1903).

This essay begins in the first person plural, but later changes to the singular. Tennyson had praised the Magazine for its “use of the plain ‘I’ in lieu of the old hackneyed unconscientious editorial ‘we’ ” (Mackail 90) and, since Fulford greatly admired Tennyson (he wrote a three-part essay on him for the Magazine), it is unlikely he would have forgotten this praise. The use of “we” for the opening of this essay, then, suggests the possibility that Hill collaborated on all three of the essays on Shakespeare. The Wellesley Index lists this essay as by Fulford alone, citing Mackail’s manuscript notes and Buxton Forman’s list (730). But both of these sources are mistaken regarding other contributions to the magazine. The essay in general is similar in its approach to the essays on Timon and Twelfth Night: all three essays rely on plot summary, character sketches, and extensive quotation, and the goal of each is to entice the reader to turn to Shakespeare’s plays. The last paragraph of this essay, in which Fulford writes “I may before long examine after the same fashion another play” (292) also links the three Shakespeare essays together.

First printed in The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine , May, 1856.