Emerging from vast textual corvées, including the joint editorship of editions of Shakespeare’s Works in the original and in modernized spelling, Gary Taylor must be not only a man of great industry but one who knows something about his author.
It is perhaps understandable that a young textual scholar who has been involved in such labors should hanker after some more reckless employment, “beyond the intellectual enclosure of Shakespeare specialists.” Taylor was so moved that his publisher can describe Reinventing Shakespeare as “bold, provocative, irreverent.” “Who was Shakespeare, and is he really as great as everyone says?” It is still the publisher haranguing us, and the reply can only be that what “everybody” means by saying that Shakespeare is “great” must amount to precious little. To Taylor himself, what you and I might mean by it is neither here nor there; his ideas are on a grander scale. “What ’shakespeare’ means in and to any given period” depends upon a number of “decisions,” most of which are happily beyond the knowledge of the ordinary reader or member of an audience and which can hardly be more than sketchily within the knowledge even of such as Gary Taylor.
One is, of course, used to academics asserting that it is frivolous to read old authors for the pleasure they can give and for the substance which more ignorant generations supposed them to contain. Taylor shifts attention from the work altogether to the imageof the author. His
