Marks was a member of the St. John's Wood Clique, a group of artists who met weekly to discuss and criticize one another's works. Among them were some painters of Shakespeare whose names and pictures appear in these pages: Philip Calderon, William Yeames, and George Leslie. Marks concentrated early in his career on literary and historical subjects, but later he turned to accomplished and accurate paintings of animals, and in particular, birds. For five decades he exhibited widely at the most prestigious shows; he was elected a member of the Royal Academy in 1878.

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography relates the comment of a friend who said of the artist that "few men were so much at home in Shakespeare as Marks, and that he knew by heart whole plays." Besides the paintings we have listed here, his works include Christopher Sly, The Jester's Test, How Shakespeare Studied, and A Bit of Blue (The Art of Shakespeare, 36). He did another entitled Bottom Enacting Pyramus (1853), but the picture was, unfortunately, deemed by the critics (and the artist) not of the quality of Marks's other Shakespeare subjects.