With Stanley Wells, he worked for eight years as the "enfant terrible"[1] of the Oxford Shakespeare (1978–86), a project that generated much controversy through editorial decisions such as printing two separate texts of King Lear and accepting and publicizing a manuscript attribution to Shakespeare of a poem commonly known as "Shall I die?"
Taylor has written extensively on Shakespeare, Middleton, early modern culture, canon formation, race and ethnicity, gender and masculinity.
Four of his works are included in the Random House list of the hundred most important books on Shakespeare (more than any other non-British author).
He is best known for his work as an editor, textual critic, and editorial theorist, for which he has received fellowships from the Folger Shakespeare Library, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
Taylor devoted twenty years to The Collected Works of Thomas Middleton, published by Oxford University Press in 2007.