Biography
GARY TAYLOR, Department Chair, Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor, Ph.D., Cambridge, is General Editor of the New Oxford Shakespeare, including Complete Works: Modern Critical Edition (2016), Complete Works: Critical Reference Edition (2017), Authorship Companion (2017), and New Oxford Shakespeare Online (2017), which combines and expands on all the print versions. He was also general editor of the Collected Works of “our other Shakespeare,” Thomas Middleton (Oxford, 2008), which won the Modern Language Association’s biennial prize for a Distinguished Scholarly edition and the Emily Dietz award for outstanding publication in early modern studies; he also co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Thomas Middleton (2012), the largest collection of new critical essays on Middleton ever published. The “Middleton Trilogy” is now available in paperback. He general-edited two series published by Palgrave, “Signs of Race” and “History of Text Technologies”. He founded the interdisciplinary History of Text Technologies program at FSU, and has written about the practice and theory of editing in various periods and genres; in 2006 he gave the McKenzie lectures at Oxford University on Edward Blount, the chief publisher of the 1623 Shakespeare folio. Taylor’s Moment by Moment by Shakespeare (MacMillan, 1985) was the winner of a Choice Award for “Outstanding Academic Book.” His other books include a history of Shakespeare’s reputation (Reinventing Shakespeare, 1989: “the most ambitious book on Shakespeare ever written”, according to a review in Shakespeare Quarterly), a theory of artistic reputations generally (Cultural Selection, 1996: “brilliant insights and beautifully reasoned prose… an original and striking analysis of culture”, according to the New York Times Book Review), and “an abbreviated history of Western manhood” (Castration, 2000: “terrific reading,” according to Salon.com). He co-edited the first collection of essays on Shakespeare and Fletcher’s partially-lost play The History of Cardenio (Oxford, 2012), and the same year his “creative reconstruction” of Cardenio was performed in Indianapolis, where it was also the subject of an international scholarly colloquium, a PBS documentary, and another collection of scholarly essays (Palgrave, 2013). His play has most recently been performed by the Richmond Shakespeare Society (2017). Taylor has also worked to communicate contemporary literary theory and criticism to a mass audience (newspapers, radio, TV, museums and theatres in North America and UK, including three Platforms at the Royal National Theatre, London). He was widely interviewed in 2016 in connection with the New Oxford Shakespeare’s identification of Christopher Marlowe as Shakespeare’s collaborator on the three Henry VI plays. Taylor is currently working on the New Oxford Shakespeare Complete Alternative Versions, to be published in print and online by Oxford University Press.
