Everyone’s heard of William Shakespeare, but scholars are vying to put the name and literary contributions of another playwright into the social conscious.

In an effort to revive Renaissance drama for modern students, the Theatre and Film Studies and English departments have collaborated to accommodate the visit of two leading scholars in theatrical productions. Florida State University’s professors of English Celia Daileader and Gary Taylor will be visiting the University to present their research and expertise to students and faculty today and Friday.

Taylor’s lecture, entitled “Our Other Shakespeare: Thomas Middleton, Sex and Tragedy,” will argue that Jacobean playwright Middleton is not another Shakespeare because he’s very different, but that he is the “other Shakespeare” since he is in the same league, Taylor said.

Middleton and Shakespeare were both Renaissance playwrights and poets who lived in England during the end of the 16th Century. Some of their works reflect each other’s style.

Taylor, a George Matthew Edgar professor and director of the history of technology program at FSU, is the editor of the Oxford’s edition of “Shakespeare’s Complete Works,” and the “Collected Works” of Middleton. He won the Choice Award for “Outstanding Academic Book” for his work, “Moment by Moment by Shakespeare.”

“I discovered Middleton when I was working on the Shakespeare project more than 20 years ago and I was comparing passages of Shakespeare to other authors,” Taylor said. “In order to do this in the early 1980s, I had to read all of Middleton and I thought, ‘Why wasn’t I taught this before?’ I wanted to make it possible for others to discover this extraordinary writer and his vision of the world.”

The author of more than a handful of books, articles and essays, Daileader will lead a lecture titled “Big Brother Bard: Shakespeare vs. His Younger Contemporaries on Women, Sex and Gender.” The lecture will encompass the erotica of Renaissance plays.

“I see Middleton as being the younger generation of playwrights who might have thought their older generation was old fashioned,” she said. “I mean, everyone’s having sex in Middleton’s plays, whereas Shakespeare is a little more on the prudish side. In ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ they have sex and then they die for it.”

Middleton is more forgiving and understands that human beings are deeply flawed, said Daileader, who believes the playwright was “sex positive,” a viewpoint that attempts to correct Puritanical beliefs that women can only be admired if they are virgins and that “good” women are not sexually active.

“This is double standard – men are rewarded whereas women are punished,” Daileader said. “The very things that turned me off with Shakespeare turned me on to Middleton.”

“In Shakespeare, you get angels and monsters, good girls and bad girls, but in Middleton, there is an array of different female characters and I think Middleton does this consciously,” she said.

Taylor and Daileader will also attend “The Changeling” tonight to provide feedback.

“I like the idea of departments working together. When I found out about the University’s ‘The Changeling’ production, it seemed an opportunity to me, given the world’s leading authorities on Middleton were in [Florida],” said Fran Teague, a University English professor. “[Daileader and Taylor] are both in Middleton projects and it’ll allow us to be closer to Middleton than we have been in years.”