Popular as an actor, Wilks was also one of the managers of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane during the early eighteenth century.

A Scottish painter, Wilkie is best known for his genre paintings.

A political leader and reformer, Wilkes was elected to parliament in 1757. He began to publish an anti-Tory weekly, the North Briton, in 1762.

Samuel Richardson's master during his apprenticeship from 1706-1713, and the father of Richardson's first wife, Martha. Wilde's son Allington remained Richardson's lifelong friend.

A character and the eponymous narrator of "The Wife of Bath's Tale." in Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales,

Geschichte des Agathon (1776-7, expanded in 1773 and 1794) is Wieland's fictionalized autobiography. Wieland's novel Geheime Geschichte des Philosophen Peregrinus Proteus (1791) examines fanaticism over scientific and philosophical developments.

William Whitehead was Poet Laureate of England from 1757 until his death. A dramatist, one of his most popular plays was the tragedy The Roman Father (1750).

A poet and satirist, Whitehead authored humorous poetry and commented on political issues of his time. His work State Dunces (1733) was an imitaion of Alexander Pope's The Dunciad (1728).

An English poet and novelist, Charles Whitehead published The Solitary in 1831. Whitehead additionally published novels such as Richard Savage in 1842 and left a drama entitled The Spanish Marriage unfinished at his death in 1862.

English dramatist and author whose The Right, Excellent and Famous Historye of Promos and Cassandra (1578) inspired Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing.