Dr. Gary Taylor
Pryor Professor in Shakespearean Literature
405 Williams Building
gtaylor@fsu.edu
English Department Profile
Gary Taylor, George Matthew Edgar Professor, Ph.D., Cambridge, is General Editor of the Oxford University Press editions of Shakespeare's Complete Works (1986, 2005) and of Thomas Middleton's Collected Works (2007), and co-author of William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (1987) and Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture (2007). The Oxford Shakespeare is widely acknowledged as the most important Shakespeare edition of the twentieth century, and the Middleton edition has been described as a book that “will alter one’s perspective on the character and the achievement of a whole literary epoch” (Dieter Mehl) and that "does for Middleton what Heminges and Condell did for Shakespeare" (James Shapiro). It includes, among other things, Taylor’s monograph-length analysis of the most complicated textual problem in English drama (the six manuscripts and two printed editions of A Game at Chess). Taylor has written about the practice and theory of editing in various periods and genres; he served (1995) as one of the judges of the first MLA prize for editing, and in 2006 gave the McKenzie lectures at Oxford University on Edward Blount, the chief publisher of the 1623 Shakespeare folio; he is currently completing a book based on those lectures. His research on Blount was funded in part by a Guggenheim Fellowship; he has also received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Folger Shakespeare Library (in each case for his work on early modern texts).
Taylor is the founding Director of the interdisciplinary History of Text Technologies program at FSU. He envisages HoTT as a way of combining materialist and quantitative “fieldwork” (associated with editing, paleography, bibliography, the history and economics of the book) with conceptual, transnational, transhistorical “theory” (associated with cultural studies, science studies, translation studies, critical race studies, gender studies, cosmopolitanism and neo-formalism). The history of text technologies, “the DNA of culture”, is fundamental to his theory of culture-making and public memory (Cultural Selection, 1996: "brilliant insights and beautifully reasoned prose…an original and striking analysis of culture", according to the New York Times Book Review).
Taylor’s graduate seminars include one on the history of Anglo-American publishing from the sixteenth to the twentieth-first centuries (fall 2006) and, team-taught with David Gants, “Editorial Theory from Jerome to J-STOR" (fall 2008).
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
Books
Cultural Selection. New York: Basic Books, 1996. Rpt. (paperback ed.) 1997.
Shakespeare Reshaped 1606-1623. With John Jowett. Oxford: Oxford U P, 1993. Rpt. 1997.
William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion. With Stanley Wells, John Jowett and William Montgomery. Oxford: Oxford U P, 1987. Rpt. (paperback ed.) New York: W. W. Norton, 1997.
Books Edited
The Collected Works of Thomas Middleton, Oxford University Press, 2007.
Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture: A Companion to The Collected Works, Oxford University Press, 2007.
John Fletcher, The Tamer Tamed, Revels Plays, 2006, co-edited with Celia R. Daileader.
The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works, Second Edition. Oxford University Press, 2005.
The Norton Shakespeare: Based on the Oxford Text. New York: W.W. Norton, 1997.
Macbeth. Edited and annotated for CD-ROM edition. With Jim Bride. New York: Bride Media, 1997.
Romeo and Juliet. Edited and annotated for CD-ROM edition. With Jim Bride and Celia Daileader. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.
Shakespeare's Editors from Rowe to Alexander. Ed. with Stanley Wells. Ann Arbor: University Microfilms International, 1988.
The Complete Works, William Shakespeare. Gen. Ed. with Stanley Wells. New York and London: Oxford U P, 1986. Rpt. on Compact Disc (Oxford, 1989); Rpt. in paperback (Oxford, 1994); Rpt. in three-volume paperback (Oxford, 1994).
The Complete Works: Original Spelling Edition, William Shakespeare. Gen. Ed. with Stanley Wells. Oxford U P, 1986.
The Division of the Kingdoms: Shakespeare's Two Versions of King Lear. New York and London: Oxford U P, 1983. Rpt. in paperback edition, 1986.
Articles and Essays
"Making Meaning Marketing Shakespeare 1623," in From Performance to Print in Early Modern England, ed. Peter Holland and Stephen Orgel, volume 3 of "Redefining British Theatre History" (Palgrave, 2006), 55-72.
"Thomas Middleton, The Spanish Gypsy, and Multiple Collaboration," in Words That Count: Essays on Early Modern Authorship, ed. Brian Boyd (University of Delaware Press, 2004), 241-73.
"Edward Blount", in The New Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004).
"The cultural politics of Maybe," in Lancastrian Shakespeare: Religion and Europe, ed. Richard Dutton, Alison Findlay and Richard Wilson (Manchester University Press, 2003), 242-58.
"Shakespeare's Mediterranean Measure for Measure," in Shakespeare and the Mediterranean: Selected Proceedings of the International Shakespeare Association World Congress, Valencia, 2001, ed. Tom Clayton, Susan Brock, and Vicente Fores (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004), 243-69.
"Middleton and Rowley-and Heywood: The Old Law and New Technologies of Attribution," Papers for the Bibliographical Society of America, 96 (2002), 165-218.
"c:\wp\file.txt 05:41 10-07-98", in The Renaissance Text: Theory, History, Editing, ed. Andrew Murphy (Manchester University Press, 2000), 44-54.
"What Is an Author [not]?" Critical Survey 7 (1995): 241-255.
"Shakespeare and Others: The Authorship of 1 Henry VI." Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 7 (1995): 145-205.
"Farrago", Textual Practice, 8 (1994), 33-42.
"The Renaissance and the End of Editing", in Palimpsest: Textual Theory and the Humanities, ed. George Bornstein and Ralph G. Williams (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 121-50.
"The Oxford Shakespeare Re-viewed by the General Editors" (co-authored with Stanley Wells), Analytical and Enumerative Bibliography, n.s. 4 (1991), 6-20.
"The date and auspices of the additions to Sir Thomas More", in Shakespeare and Sir Thomas More, ed. T. H. Howard-Hill (Cambridge: University Press, 1989), 101-29.
"Textual and Sexual Criticism: A Crux in The Comedy of Errors", Renaissance Drama, 19 (1989), 195-225.
"Textual Double Knots: 'make rope's in such a scarre'", in Shakespeare: Text, Subtext, and Context, ed. Ronald Dotterer (1989), 163-85.
"The Rhetoric of Textual Criticism," TEXT, 4 (1988), 39-56.
"Praestat Difficilior Lectio: All's Well that Ends Well and Richard III" Renaissance Studies 2 (1988) 27-46.
"Revising Shakespeare," TEXT, 3 (1987), 285-304.
"The Three Texts of 2 Henry IV" (co-authored with John Jowett), Studies in Bibliography, 40 (1987), 31-50.
"Inventing Shakespeare," Shakespeare Jahrbuch, 122 (1986), 26-44.
"The Transmission of Pericles," Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 80 (1986), 193-217.
"The Fortunes of Oldcastle," Shakespeare Survey, 38 (1985), 85-100.
"Some Manuscripts of Shakespeare's Sonnets," Bulletin of the JohnRylandsUniversity Library of Manchester, 68 (1985), 210-46.
"Folio Compositors and Folio Copy: King Lear and its Context," Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 79 (1985), 17-74.
"Sprinklings of Authority: The Folio Text of Richard II" (co-authored with John Jowett), Studies in Bibiliography, 38 (1985), 151-200.
"Troilus and Cressida: Bibliography, Performance, and Interpretation," Shakespeare Studies, 16 (1983), 99-136.
"The Folio Copy for Hamlet, King Lear, and Othello," Shakespeare Quarterly, 34 (1983), 44-61.
"Copy-Text and Collation (with special reference to Richard III)," The Library, VI, 3 (1981), 33-42.
"The Shrinking Compositor A of the Shakespeare First Folio," Studies in Bibliography, 34 (1981), 96-117.
"The War in King Lear," Shakespeare Survey, 33 (1980), 27-34.
Essays in Anthologies
"Revising Shakespeare" in Shakespeare: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory 1945-2000, ed. Russ Mcdonald (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004).
"The Fortunes of Oldcastle" and "The War in King Lear" in Shakespeare Criticism 1953-2003, ed. Sarah Stanton and Stanley Wells (Cambridge UP, 2003).
"The Fortunes of Oldcastle" in 1 Henry IV, Norton Critical Edition, 3d. Ed., ed. Gordon McMullan (New York, 2003), 129-49.
"Textual and Sexual Criticism" rpt. in Shakespeare and Gender, ed. Stephen Orgel and Sean Keilen (New York: Garland, 1999), 305-335.
"Revising Shakespeare" rpt. in Shakespeare and the Literary Tradition, ed. Stephen Orgel and Sean Keilen (New York: Garland, 1999).
"Inventing Shakespeare" and "Folio Copy" reprinted in Shakespeare and the Editorial Tradition, ed. Stephen Orgel and Sean Keilen (New York: Garland, 1999), 124-43, 378-96.