active 1700-1709 Thomas Baker

Little is firmly known about his life, but standard biographical sources describe him as an English dramatist active from about 1700 to 1709. He is said to have been the son of a prominent London attorney and probably educated at Oxford.

He wrote a run of comedies for Drury Lane, including The Humour of the Age (1701), Tunbridge Walks (1703), An Act at Oxford (1704), Hampstead Heath (1705), and The Fine Lady's Airs (1709). Of these, Tunbridge Walks became the best known, with later revivals that suggest it stayed popular well beyond his own decade.

Later writers passed along colorful and not always reliable stories about his personal life, so many details remain uncertain. What is clearer is his place in theatre history: he was writing during a transitional period in English comedy, and his plays help capture the changing mood of the early eighteenth-century stage.