Gary Taylor (scholar)

• 1. Introduction

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  Gary Taylor was born in 1953, the first member of his family to ever graduate from high school. That detail alone reframes everything that followed. Here was a man who would go on to reshape how the world reads Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton, who would earn fellowships from the Folger Shakespeare Library, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He did it starting from a place where finishing high school was itself a milestone worth noting.

  Scholarships carried him to bachelor's degrees in English and Classics from the University of Kansas in 1975, then to a doctorate from the University of Cambridge in 1988. Along the way, he became one of the most debated editors in Shakespearean scholarship, a figure who spent decades asking uncomfortable questions about who actually wrote what. Four of his books appear on the Random House list of the hundred most important works on Shakespeare. No other non-British author has placed more titles on that list.

  What made Taylor genuinely unusual was not just his output, but the range of it. He wrote about race and ethnicity, gender and masculinity, canon formation, and early modern culture. He wrote for Time and The Guardian. He spoke to theatre audiences and gave radio and television interviews. And for twenty years, he quietly devoted himself to a project that would claim Thomas Middleton deserved a place alongside Shakespeare himself.

• 2. The Oxford Shakespeare Wars

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  Stanley Wells and Taylor spent eight years together on the Oxford Shakespeare project, from 1978 to 1986, and colleagues nicknamed them the "enfant terrible" of the enterprise. The project produced choices that unsettled the scholarly world.

  One of the most striking was the decision to print two separate texts of King Lear rather than merging them into a single composite edition. The received wisdom had long been to reconcile variant versions into one authoritative text. Taylor and Wells refused that approach, insisting the two texts represented distinct creative stages and deserved to stand separately.

  The team also accepted and publicized a manuscript attribution of the poem commonly known as "Shall I die?" to Shakespeare. That call proved more lasting in its controversy. The attribution has since been almost universally rejected by scholars, and it remains one of the most cited examples in debates about editorial overreach.

  The complete edition, William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion, appeared in 1987 with Wells, Taylor, John Jowett, and William Montgomery as co-authors. The Division of the Kingdoms, a collection Taylor co-edited with Michael Warren, had appeared in 1983 and addressed related questions about the King Lear texts. Taylor also co-authored Shakespeare Reshaped 1606-1623 with Jowett in 1993, continuing the argument that Shakespeare's plays had been significantly altered after their original composition.

• 3. A Career Built Across Institutions

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  Oxford University was only the beginning of a teaching career that crossed multiple institutions on two continents. Taylor went on to Catholic University of America, then to Brandeis University, where he chaired the English department.

  At the University of Alabama, he directed the Hudson Strode Program in Renaissance Studies from 1995 to 2005. That decade-long directorship anchored him in early modern literature at a research level, not just a classroom one.

  In 2005, he joined the English Department at Florida State University. There he founded and served as first director of the History of Text Technologies program, an interdisciplinary initiative that reached beyond literary study into the broader questions of how texts are made, transmitted, and transformed. He also served six years as department chair at Florida State. His current title is Robert Lawton Distinguished University Professor of English, one of the university's highest faculty designations.

• 4. Reclaiming Middleton

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  Twenty years of work concluded in 2007 when Oxford University Press published The Collected Works of Thomas Middleton. Taylor and John Lavagnino led a team of 75 contributors drawn from 12 countries to produce what the editors called "the Middleton First Folio," deliberately echoing the 1623 Shakespeare First Folio in name and ambition.

  The project's central claim was that Middleton deserved recognition as "our other Shakespeare." That phrase carried a weight of argument behind it. Taylor and Lavagnino included the complete texts of Shakespeare's Macbeth and Measure for Measure, arguing that Middleton had revised both plays after Shakespeare originally composed them. Timon of Athens also appeared in the volume, but with a different argument attached: that it was a collaboration between Shakespeare and Middleton from the start.

  The volume also made room for plays whose authorship has always been contested. A Yorkshire Tragedy, The Second Maiden's Tragedy (published there under the title The Lady's Tragedy), and The Revenger's Tragedy all appeared. Modern scholars generally credit these to Middleton, though not universally. Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture, a companion volume with Taylor and Lavagnino also as general editors, appeared simultaneously in 2007.

  For Taylor, the Middleton project was not simply an act of rescue for an undervalued playwright. It was a demonstration of his argument about canon formation itself: that the literary canon is not discovered but made, and that editorial decisions carry real cultural consequences.

• 5. Beyond the Canon

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  Reinventing Shakespeare, published in 1989, offered a cultural history of how Shakespeare's reputation had been constructed and reconstructed from the Restoration to the late twentieth century. The book sits within Taylor's broader preoccupation with how cultural value gets assigned and defended.

  Cultural Selection followed in 1996, extending those questions past literary studies into wider theory. Then came Castration: An Abbreviated History of Western Manhood in 2000, a book whose title signaled Taylor's willingness to go where most Shakespeare scholars did not. Buying Whiteness: Race, Culture, and Identity from Columbus to Hip Hop appeared in 2005, tracing the construction of racial identity across several centuries.

  The breadth of those titles is not incidental. Taylor has consistently treated Shakespeare and Middleton not as monuments sealed off from history but as participants in the same cultural processes that shaped race, gender, and power. His academic appointments and his fellowships have supported that range, and his public writing in outlets like Time and The Guardian brought the arguments to audiences well outside the university. The New Oxford Shakespeare, which Taylor co-edited, represents his most recent major editorial project and carries forward the textual and theoretical commitments that have defined his work since those eight years with Stanley Wells at Oxford.