WHITELOCKE, JAMES, afterwards Sir James. Merchant Taylors, 1575–86.
WILDER, PHILIP VAN. Gentleman of the Privy Chamber and lutenist, commissioned to raise a royal company of young minstrels in 1550; cf. ch. xii, s.v. Chapel.
‘WILL.’ Strange’s, 1590–1.
‘WILL.’ Admiral’s, 1597.
WILLIAMS, JOHN. Chapel, 1509.
WILSON, JOHN. In Much Ado, ii. 3. 38, for the ‘Enter Balthaser with musicke’ of Q1, F1 has ‘Enter ... Iacke Wilson’, who therefore, at some date before 1623, sang ‘Sigh no more, ladies!’ He is probably the son of Nicholas Wilson, ‘minstrel’, baptized at St. Bartholomew’s the Less on 24 April 1585. He had an elder brother Adam, and buried a wife Joan on 17 July 1624, and an unnamed son on 3 September 1624 at St. Giles’s from the house of George Sommerset, musician (Collier, Actors, xviii). He seems to have become a city ‘wait’ about 1622 and to have still held his post in 1641, and has been confused (Collier in Sh. Soc. Papers, ii. 33; E. F. Rimbault, Who was Jacke Wilson?, 1846) with another John Wilson, born in 1595, a royal lutenist and musician of distinction (cf. D. N. B.). One or other of them was concerned with a performance of M. N. D. in the house of John Williams, Bishop of Lincoln, on 27 September 1631, which gave offence to the Puritans (Murray, ii. 148).
WILSON, ROBERT, was one of Leicester’s men in 1572, 1574, and 1581. A reference in Gabriel Harvey’s correspondence of 1579 suggests that he was conspicuous amongst the actors of the day, and Lodge’s praise about the same date in the Defence of Plays of his Shorte and Sweete, ‘the practice of a good scholler,’ shows that he was also a playwright. This piece Lodge compares with Gosson’s Catiline’s Conspiracies, and it may have been on the same theme. Further evidence of his reputation is in the letter of 1581 from T. Baylye (q. v.). In 1583 he joined the Queen’s men, and is described by Howes in his account of the formation of that company as a ‘rare’ man ‘for a quicke, delicate, refined, extemporall witt’. He is not in the Queen’s list of 1588. This may not be quite complete; on the other hand he may by then have left the company. I see no solid foundation for the conjectures of Fleay, ii. 279, that he was the player of Greenes Groatsworth of Wit (cf. App. C, No. xlviii) who penned the Moral of Man’s Wit and the Dialogue of Dives, that he wrote Fair Em, that he left the Queen’s for Strange’s in 1590 and thereby incurred Greene’s hostility, that he is the Roscius of Nashe’s Menaphon epistle, that he died of the plague in 1593. It is extremely unlikely that he died in 1593, for in his Palladis Tamia of 1598, after lauding Tarlton as famous for ‘extemporall verse’, Meres continues, ‘And so is now our wittie Wilson, who for learning and extemporall witte in this facultie is without compare or compeere, as to his great and eternall commendations he manifested in his chalenge at the Swanne on the Banke side.’ The common use by Meres and Howes of the phrase ‘extemporall witte’ renders it almost impossible to suppose that they are not speaking of the same man. It is true that, in the Apology for Actors, Heywood, whose knowledge of the stage must have gone back at least to 1594, classes Wilson with the older generation of actors, whom he never saw, as being before his time, and I take it the explanation is that, at or before the virtual break-up of the Queen’s men in the plague of 1592–3, Wilson gave up acting, and devoted himself to writing, and occasional extemporizing on themes. He is generally supposed to be the R. W. of The Three Ladies of London (1584) and The Three Lords of London (1590), and the ‘Robert Wilson, Gent.’ of The Cobbler’s Prophecy (1594). The ‘Gent.’ is hardly an insuperable obstacle to identifying him with the ‘Robert Wilson, yoman (a player)’, who was buried at St. Giles’s, Cripplegate, on 20 November 1600 (Collier, Actors, xviii). A Wilson is in the suspected Admiral’s cast of c. January 1600. But now comes the real difficulty. Meres, also in the Palladis Tamia and without any indication that he has another man in mind, includes ‘Wilson’ in a group of ‘the best for comedy amongst vs’, which is composed of the principal writers for the Admiral’s in 1598, and amongst these writers, as shown by Henslowe’s papers, was a Robert Wilson, who collaborated in eleven plays during 1598, and in three more during 1599 and 1600. He is last mentioned in a letter of 14 June 1600. This is generally taken to be a younger man than the Queen’s player, possibly a Robert Wilson who was baptized at St. Botolph’s, Bishopsgate, on 22 September 1579, and married Mary Eaton there on 24 June 1606, possibly the Robert Wilson (not described as ‘a player and the younger’ as Collier suggests in Bodl.) whose son Robert was baptized at St. Leonard’s on 15 January 1601 (Stopes, Burbage, 141), possibly the Robert Wilson whose burial is recorded at St. Bartholomew’s the Less on 21 October 1610. On the whole, I am inclined to think that, in view of the character of Meres’ references, of the use of Catiline as a play-theme both about 1580 and in 1598 (cf. ch. xxiii), and of the sudden disappearance of Wilson from Henslowe’s diary in the year of the ‘player’s’ death, the balance of evidence is in favour of one playwright rather than two. The undefined share of the Admiral’s man in the extant 1 Sir John Oldcastle does not really afford a basis for stylistic comparison with the more old-fashioned manners of the 1584–94 plays. There is nothing to show that the Bishopsgate man had any connexion with the stage, still less that he was a son of the Queen’s player, as has been suggested.
WINTER, RICHARD. Possibly an actor at Canterbury, c. 1571 (3 Library, ix. 253).
WODERAM, RICHARD. Oxford’s, 1586–7 (?).
WOODFORD, THOMAS. Whitefriars lessee, 1608, 1621.