Robert Wilks

He was, with Colley Cibber and Thomas Doggett, one of the "triumvirate" of actor-managers that was denounced by Alexander Pope and caricatured by William Hogarth as leaders of the decline in theatrical standards and degradation of the stage's literary tradition.

His great-uncle, Judge Wilks, had served Charles I of England during the English Civil War, for whom he raised a troop at his own expense.

In 1709, Wilks, with Cibber, Thomas Doggett, and Anne Oldfield joined Owen Swiny in managing the Haymarket.

Thomas Doggett, according to Colley Cibber's somewhat unreliable memoir, forbade any woman being part of the group of managers, and Owen Swiny decided to return to the Haymarket, and so the remaining actor managers formed a "triumvirate."

These three managers had profitable and difficult positions, and it is likely that from 1711 to 1714 the shares of the triumvirate never made less than the fantastic sum of £1,000 a year.

In 1713, Barton Booth replaced Doggett as actor-manager, and in 1714 Richard Steele joined them and got the theatre a royal patent.

William Hogarth depicted Wilks as a man busy making a pantomime play of a jail break while using scripts for Hamlet as toilet paper.

The actor managers responded to the increasing move for "spectacle" plays (see Augustan drama for context) and quick productions with low costs, and thus the triumvirate, in particular, was frequently satirized for cheapening the stage.

Although married at the time, in the 1690s he had relationship with the actress Jane Rogers which led to the birth of a daughter of the same name Jane Rogers, who appeared as an actress at Lincoln's Inn Field and Covent Garden during the eighteenth century.