At the outbreak of World War I Wilson joined the army, serving in France, and sustaining serious injuries at Battle of the Somme in 1916. Recovery in hospital took over a year, and, besides, left Wilson with a permanent limp and vulnerability to recurrent infections.[1] He returned to Oxford as University Lecturer in 1921 and was promoted to Reader in 1927. He became the Tutor of C. S. Lewis in 1922. At Oxford, Wilson published Dekker's Foure Birds of Noahs Arke (1924) and Plague Pamphlets of T. Dekker (1925). He worked on and off for many years on a four volume edition of Dekker's prose works, but it was never completed. However, the incidental, The Plague in Shakespeare's London (1925) proved popular with readers and was brought out in paperback in 1958.[1]
With Bonamy Dobrée, Wilson became in 1935 the general editor of the Oxford History of English Literature. He wrote the volume, English drama from 1485 to 1642 himself. He gave British Academy lectures in 1941 and the Clark Lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1951, both published later in book form.[1]
According to ODNB biographers, Jean Robertson and P. J. Connell, "The chief merits of Wilson's dramatic criticism were his constant alertness to the exigencies of the stage (he was a promising amateur actor in his early days); and, most remarkably, his unrivalled knowledge of contemporary word usage and phraseology,..." yielding ultimately his Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs. He was, they continue, "the most learned Elizabethan scholar of his generation, as well as a master of social graces and a witty conversationalist."[1]
Wilson was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 1943 and awarded an honorary LLD of the University of Birmingham in 1947; he was made an honorary fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford, in 1948. F. P. Wilson died at his home in Berkshire, on 29 May 1963.[1]
Wilson, Frank Percy (1970), "The English history play" and "Shakespeare's Comedies", in Gardner, Helen; Louise, Dame (eds.), Shakespearian and Other Studies, Wilson, F. P. (Frank Percy), Clarendon Press, ISBN9780198116776
Wilson, Frank Percy (1978), The proverbial wisdom of Shakespeare, Presidential address of the Modern Humanities Research Association 1961, Folcroft Library Edition, retrieved 27 September 2013