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Gary Taylor (born 1953) is an American academic, Robert Lawton Distinguished University Professor of English atFlorida State University, author of numerous books and articles, and joint editor ofThe Oxford Shakespeare,The Oxford Middleton, and "The New Oxford Shakespeare."
The first member of his family to graduate from high school, Taylor won scholarships that led to bachelor's degrees in English and Classics from theUniversity of Kansas (1975) and to a doctorate in English from theUniversity of Cambridge (1988). WithStanley Wells, he worked for eight years as the "enfant terrible"[1] of the Oxford Shakespeare (1978–86), a project that generated much controversy through editorial decisions such as printing two separate texts ofKing Lear and accepting and publicizing a manuscript attribution to Shakespeare of a poem commonly known as "Shall I die?" (an attribution that has since been almost universally rejected).[2] He has taught atOxford University,Catholic University of America,Brandeis University (where he was Chair of the English department), and theUniversity of Alabama (where he directed the Hudson Strode Program inRenaissance Studies, 1995–2005). In 2005, he joined the English Department at Florida State University, where he became founder and first director of the interdisciplinary History of Text Technologies program, and served six years as department chair.
Taylor has written extensively onShakespeare,Middleton, early modern culture, canon formation, race and ethnicity, gender and masculinity. Four of his works are included in theRandom House list of the hundred most important books on Shakespeare (more than any other non-British author). He is best known for his work as an editor, textual critic, and editorial theorist, for which he has received fellowships from theFolger Shakespeare Library, theNational Endowment for the Humanities, and theJohn Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He has also written forTime,The Guardian, and other periodicals, spoken to many theatre audiences, and been often interviewed on radio and television.
Taylor devoted twenty years toThe Collected Works of Thomas Middleton, published byOxford University Press in 2007. With John Lavagnino, he led a team of 75 contributors from 12 countries to produce "the Middleton First Folio," designed to establish Middleton’s status as "our other Shakespeare." Among other works, Taylor and Lavagnino chose to print the entire texts of William Shakespeare's playsMacbeth andMeasure for Measure, on the theory that Middleton revised both of these plays after their original composition. They include Shakespeare'sTimon of Athens as well, but in this case postulating that it was a collaboration between the two authors. Also included in the volume are such anonymous plays asA Yorkshire Tragedy,The Second Maiden's Tragedy (presented under the titleThe Lady's Tragedy) andThe Revenger's Tragedy, which are generally, though not universally, credited to Middleton by modern scholars.[3]
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