Wilson,Robert

Little is known about the life of Robert Wilson (d.1600) outside of theatrical records. In 1572, 1574, and 1581 Robert Wilson's name appears in documents that place him in the company of players of Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester. He was one of 12 star players culled in 1583 from various companies to form the Queen's Men, a troupe that would dominate London and provincial playing for the next decade. Wilson is not included in an incomplete 1588 list of Queen's Men's players; he may possibly have left the group by then, but other missing names belong to men known to be dead by this time, and there is some speculation that the actor died sometime in the mid‐1580s and that the author of the plays attributed to Robert Wilson was a second, younger man (the latter perhaps not an actor himself). Such a theory seems supported by a well‐known reference in Thomas Heywood'sApology for actors(1612) in which he talks of Wilson being ‘before my time’. But a Wilson who had been around since the 1570s, survived until 1600, and wrote ‘oldfashioned’ moral drama would probably not be considered by Heywood a strict contemporary. Francis Meres'sPalladis tamia(1598), on the other hand, talks of ‘now our wittie Wilson’ presenting a ‘challenge at the Swan on the Bankside’, a reference that seems to place Wilson on stage in the late 1590s, a man still acting or at least entertaining as well as writing. The year 1588 did see the death of another famous clown, however, for it was in this year that Wilson's fellow comic actor in the Queen's Men, Richard Tarleton, died. Wilson includes a scene in hisThe three lordes and three ladies of London(1588–89) in which a ‘picture’ and ballad of Tarleton are presented on stage, and it would be a touching tribute from one Queen's player to another if this were played by the Queen's Men themselves.