January – Colley Cibber's play Love's Last Shift is first performed at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in London.
November 21 – John Vanbrugh's first play, the comedy The Relapse, or Virtue in Danger, a sequel to Love's Last Shift, is first performed at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, with Cibber in the cast.[1]
The Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, London, stages The Female Wits, an anti-feminist satire targeting Mary Pix, Delarivier Manley and Catherine Trotter, the three significant women dramatists of the era. The play is a hit, and runs for three nights straight (unusual in the repertory system of the day).
Tuscan poet Vincenzo da Filicaja becomes governor of Volterra.
FictionEdit
John Aubrey – Miscellanies
Philip Ayres – The Revengeful Mistress
Aphra Behn (died 1689) – The Histories and Novels of the Late Ingenious Mrs. Behn
Charles Leslie – The Snake in the Grass
Mary Pix – The Inhumane Cardinal; or, Innocence Betray'd (novel)
John Suckling – The Works of Sir John Suckling
John Tillotson – The Works of John Tillotson
John Banks – Cyrus the Great, or The Tragedy of Love
Aphra Behn – The Younger Brother, or The Amorous Jilt
Colley Cibber – Love's Last Shift
Thomas Doggett – The Country Wake
Thomas D'Urfey – The Comical History of Don Quixote. The Third Part
George Granville, 1st Baron Lansdowne – The She-Gallants
Joseph Harris – The City Bride; or, The Merry Cuckold (adapted from A Cure for a Cuckold)
Charles Hopkins – Neglected Virtue; or, The Unhappy Conquerour
Delarivier Manley
The Lost Lover, or The Jealous Husband
The Royal Mischief
Peter Anthony Motteux
Love's a Jest
She Ventures and He Wins
Mary Pix
The Spanish Wives
Ibrahim, the Thirteenth Emperour of the Turks
Edward Ravenscroft – The Anatomist, or the Sham Doctor
Thomas Southerne – Oroonoko, or The Royal Slave: a tragedy (adapted from Aphra Behn's novel Oroonoko - published)
John Vanbrugh – The Relapse
Nicholas Brady and Nahum Tate – New Version of the Psalms of David
John Dryden – An Ode on the Death of Mr Henry Purcell (died 1695)
John Oldmixon – Poems on Several Occasions
Elizabeth Singer Rowe – Poems on Several Occasions
Nahum Tate – Miscellanea Sacra; or, Poems on Divine & Moral Subjects
Richard Baxter – Reliquiae Baxterianae (posthumous)
John Bellers – Proposals for Raising a College of Industry of All Useful Trades and Husbandry
Gerard Croese – The General History of the Quakers (translation)
Judith Drake (attributed) – An Essay in Defence of the Female Sex (anonymous)
Delarivier Manley – Letters Written by Mrs. Manley
William Penn – Primitive Christianity Revived in the Faith and Practice of the People called Quakers
John Sheffield, 1st Duke of Buckingham and Normanby – The Character of Charles II, King of England
John Toland – Christianity not Mysterious[2]
William Whiston – A New Theory of the Earth
July 14 – William Oldys, English antiquary, bibliographer and poet (died 1761)
October 13 – John Hervey, 2nd Baron Hervey, English memoirist and courtier (died 1743)
Unknown date – Matthew Green, English writer of light verse and customs official (died 1737)
January 3 – Mary Mollineux, English Quaker poet (born c.1651)
March 18 – Bonaventura Baron, Irish theologian, philosopher and writer in Latin (born 1610)
April 27 – Simon Foucher, French polemic philosopher (born 1644)
May 10 – Jean de La Bruyère, French essayist (born 1645)
June 9 – Antoine Varillas, French historian (born 1626)
August 9 – Wacław Potocki, Polish nobleman (Szlachta), moralist, Baroque poet and writer (born 1621)
September 8 – Henry Birkhead, English academic, lawyer, Latin poet and founder of the Oxford Chair of Poetry (born 1617)
November 26 – Gregório de Matos, Brazilian Baroque poet (born 1636)
Unknown dates
Jón Magnússon, Icelandic writer (born c. 1610)
Gesshū Sōko (月舟宗胡), Japanese Zen Buddhist teacher, poet and calligrapher (born 1618)
^ Palmer, Alan; Palmer, Veronica (1992). The Chronology of British History. London: Century Ltd. pp. 200–201. ISBN 0-7126-5616-2.
^ Berman, David (1995). Honderich, Ted (ed.). The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 877. ISBN 0-19-866132-0.