A couple of minor clarifications:

AVON:NOVA and BARD:DRAB aren’t just anagrams, they’re reversals. And “rerun” and “turned” could be anagram indicators, but in these cases they’re a little more specific, they suggest reversals.

I liked the BARD clue a lot, too. I thought the surface clue was cute–”Colorless turned artsy in college” paints a nice picture of something that could happen to someone. The clue breaks down as colorless–>DRAB and “turned”–>BARD, and the definition is “artsy ‘in’ college.” I don’t know whether Bard is still an “in” college, but it once was, and it surely still is artsy.

(Its president Leon Botstein is a sometime musician whom I believe David knows, but I’ll let him tell you about that.)

A good cryptic puzzle clue will never require you to make an anagram unless all the letters are present in the clue. They are for NOVA:AVON, but they aren’t for DRAB:BARD; you have to make DRAB first. So I would never ask for an anagram of a derived word. A reversal of a derived word is fair game, imo.

The Puck clue is also a double definition, as “Wolfgang” is the first name of the famous chef.

And Richard Burton did a lot of other Shakespeare, too, besides Hamlet. (And he was indeed Liz’s 4th and 5th husband.)

Colorless is “drab” – turned indicates an anagram and “Bard” is a prominent art school in New York as well being as the primary epithet for Willy S.

I struggled forever with this one and really do think it’s the most clever of the set.

As for #6, “iambic” has six letters, right?

1. Anagram of oreo + the top of milk i.e. ‘m’
2. Bashful = ’shy’ secure = ‘lock’
3. Wil – son net – ted (14 lines in a sonnet)
4. Alternative name of reversi is Othello which is the play Desdemona’s in
5. Ernie’s pal = Burt put on ‘on’ Richard Burton was Elizabeth Taylor’s 4th and 5th husband (I think). Played Hamlet (I think).
6. Anagram of ‘carpet beaten, mimi’ and there are 5 metrical feet in an iambic pentameter.
7. Anagram of ‘over an’
8. Waf -fles h- oney. Corpulence relates to flesh and a pound of it is in the ‘Merchant of Venice’
9. Edward Lear wrote limericks, lewd look = leer, King Lear.
10. Seinfeld is a comedy, Reticent = ‘coy’ with ‘med’ in the middle
11. Hear a case = ‘try’ with ‘aged’ in the middle
12. First letters ‘G’uys, ‘l’et’s ‘o’vercompensate ‘b’y ‘e’nding. The Globe Theatre was where Shakespeare’s plays were performed in London
13. Ice hockey puck, character in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’
14. Anagram of ‘nova’, river in Stratford, Shakepeare’s birthplace.
15. Swan? Wan with an ‘S’ on? Theatre in Stratford currently? Very tenuous.