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“... Why do people read a biography of Shakespeare? Either as a substitute for or as a supplement to a reading of his work. I may read about Byron or Orton because the life itself is both well-documented and well worth watching; but Shakespeare’s life is neither. How he behaved, what he endured, who he knew, where he went – such information does not expand or deepen my grasp of human possibility, as in their different ways the history of Thomas More or John Milton does ...”

“... Act Three, Scene Three of Julius Caesar ends with the murder of a poet. It begins with a stage direction: Enter Cinna the poet, and after him the Plebeians. This direction creates two oppositions. The poet is opposed to the plebeians. And ‘Cinna the poet’ is opposed to ‘Cinna the conspirator’, a character with the same name but a different vocation ...”

“... to be learned from the appearance of the new Oxford Middleton. Even as the blurb declares that Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino’s monumental collection is ‘based on the award-winning design of the Oxford Shakespeare’, the binding and dust jacket defiantly proclaim its difference from that distinguished model. The Shakespeare was bound in the ...”

“... language. They don’t, in themselves, ‘mean’. It is we who mean, by them.In just this spirit, Gary Taylor’s Re-Inventing Shakespeare offers a lively ‘cultural history’ of our use of the Bard. In fact, he proposes a new discipline, somewhat clumsily dubbed ‘Shakesperotics’, whose field is more or less everything that a culture gets up to in ...”

“... When Oxford decided to do Shakespeare they clearly made up their minds that the scale of the operation must be very grand, and a team of scholars has been working hard for eight years to get it done quickly, done right, and done with the greatest possible display and novelty. One has to admire not only the industry of Professor Wells and his associates, but their flair for publicity, as evidenced by the enormous solemn fuss about the poem ‘Shall I die?’, now accorded an honoured place in their canon, and also by the proclaimed scope and originality of their enterprise, which, though not essentially different from other such enterprises, is different in many eye-catching ways, and must have set the Press some unique problems ...”

“... the two versions of Lear much more tightly into their political and transient moments than even Gary Taylor managed in his contribution to The Division of the Kingdoms. In the process, she undermines the assumption of timelessness which generates a lot of the canon’s ostensible value. On the margins of the canon, too, there is a queue of new ...”

“... our knowledge of Shakespeare’s Sonnets by elaborating new work on manuscript miscellanies, Gary Taylor had every reason to think himself on a winning streak when he opened Rawlinson Poet MS 160. The fact that the poem is bad may be an embarrassment. Robin Robbins’s attack on arguments for its authorship based on parallels may be – is ...”

“... With the Oxford Shakespeare, they attempted a ground-up, total remodelling job. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor were recruited into the Press for a substantial portion of their scholarly careers. The expenditure must have been huge. The results, judging by reviews of the edition, may not have been entirely satisfactory. The Press seems to have had better ...”

“... or should be definitive ... Our own edition ... is inevitably not only fallible but arbitrary.’ Gary Taylor’s General Introduction carefully explains why this is so. It does a great deal more than that, tracing with learning and amenity the history of editorial interferences from the moment when Shakespeare’s ‘plot’ and his ‘foul ...”

“... Troilus, where Palmer enters into a discussion of the order of printing different Quarto sheets. Gary Taylor’s important and challenging arguments about the text of Henry V have been published elsewhere; here he is content to summarise (and on occasion to modify), and I especially admired the way in which he assimilates his textual arguments to a very ...”

“... it, we owe him quite a lot, and the blood boils when we remember how he was humbled by Graham Taylor in his final game for England: taken off with half an hour to go and a Lineker-style goal desperately needed. The liveliest section of this otherwise pretty tame account of his career comes at the end when Colin Malam gets ...”

“... names beginning with a B?’ Or it would be: ‘Pick an XI in which every position is taken by a Gary. I will start you off. Gary Bailey in goal. Gary Stevens right back. Now you carry on.’ Yes, truly boring. But in those days soccer-mania was dark and lonely work. Outside my small ...”

“... elsewhere – is inherited from that edition.) Oxford’s general editors, Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, decided that, instead of trying to reproduce Shakespeare’s texts as their author had allegedly and solitarily intended them (the goal of most previous editions), they should acknowledge both the collective nature of Elizabethan drama and the ...”

“... harshly criticised by Dr Johnson, his stock is high among modern editors and experts. According to Gary Taylor he was ‘one of the finest editors of the last three centuries’, while Brian Vickers accounts him ‘the best all-round editor of Shakespeare in this period or any other’. In Shakespeare Restored, Theobald set out his stall as a new kind of ...”

“... Some years ago, Gary Indiana visited Eurodisney, and returned with a suggestion for how it could be improved. ‘If I ran an amusement park,’ he wrote, ‘there would be real pirates and gypsies and an authentic criminal element on hand to supply a sense of risk.’ He constructs fiction on the same principle. His early works featured characters designed to resemble his past lives and former friends: a New York art critic in obsessive love (Horse Crazy); an American who acted in European art films (Gone Tomorrow ...”