1607 in literature

Events

• January 22 – Shortly before his death, bookseller Cuthbert Burby transfers the rights to print the text of The Taming of the Shrew to Nicholas Ling.
• February 2 – The King's Men perform Barnes's The Devil's Charter at the English Court.
• June 5 – John Hall marries Susanna, daughter of William Shakespeare.
• September 5 – Hamlet is performed aboard the East India Company ship Red Dragon, under the command of Captain William Keeling, anchored off the coast of Sierra Leone, the first known performance of a Shakespeare play outside England in English, and the first by amateurs.
• September 30 – Richard II is acted aboard the Dragon.
• unknown dates
• *First performance of the first wholly parodic play in English, Francis Beaumont's The Knight of the Burning Pestle, unsuccessfully, probably by child actors at the Blackfriars Theatre in London.
• *The King's Revels Children are active as a playing company in London: their repertoire includes Edward Sharpham's Cupid's Whirligig and Thomas Middleton's The Family of Love.

  New books

Prose

• William Alabaster – Apparatus in Revelationem Jesu Christi
• John Cowell – The Interpreter
• Michael Drayton – The Legend of Great Cromwell
• :fr:Antoine Loysel|Antoine Loysel – Institutes coutumières
• César Oudin – Thrésor des deux langues françoise et espagnole
• Lawrence Twine – The Pattern of Painful Adventures, second edition; a source for Shakespeare's Pericles, Prince of Tyre
• Honoré d'Urfé – L'Astrée

  Drama

• William Alexander, 1st Earl of Stirling – The Monarchic Tragedies
• Thomas Campion – Lord Hay's Masque
• George Chapman – Bussy D'Ambois
• John Day, William Rowley, and George Wilkins – The Travels of the Three English Brothers
• Thomas Dekker – The Whore of Babylon
• Thomas Dekker and John Webster – Westward Ho and Northward Ho published
• Dekker & Webster, with Henry Chettle, Thomas Heywood, and Wentworth Smith – Sir Thomas Wyatt
• Thomas Heywood – The Fair Maid of the Exchange
• Ben Jonson – Volpone
• John Marston – What You Will
• Thomas Middleton
• *Michaelmas Term
• *The Phoenix
• *The Puritan
• *The Revenger's Tragedy
• Edward Sharpham – Cupid's Whirligig
• Thomas Tomkis – Lingua
• George Wilkins – The Miseries of Enforced Marriage

  Poetry

• Thomas Dekker – The Seven Deadly Sins of London

  Births

• March 8 – Johann von Rist, German poet
• July 10 – Philippe Labbe, French Jesuit writer
• October 4 – Francisco de Rojas Zorrilla, Spanish dramatist
• November 1 – Georg Philipp Harsdorffer, German poet and translator
• November 5 – Anna Maria van Schurman, Dutch poet
• November 15 – Madeleine de Scudéry, French writer
• Unknown dates
• *Alaol, Bengali poet
• *Antoine Gombaud, French essayist
• *Filadelfo Mugnos, Italian historian
• *Francisco Núñez de Pineda y Bascuñán, Chilean writer and soldier

  Deaths

• January 6 – Guidobaldo del Monte, Italian philosopher
• May – Sir Edward Dyer, English poet
• June – Thomas Newton, English physician, clergyman, poet, author and translator
• June 19 – Johannes Bertelius, historian of Luxembourg
• June 30 – Caesar Baronius, Italian ecclesiastical historian
• July 6 – Achille Gagliardi, Italian theologian
• July 7 – Penelope Rich, Lady Rich, English noblewoman, inspiration for Sir Philip Sidney's "Stella"
• October 31 – Wawrzyniec Grzymała Goślicki, Polish philosopher
• Unknown dates
• *Cuthbert Burby, English publisher and bookseller
• *Dinko Ranjina, Croatian poet
• Probable year of death – Henry Chettle, English dramatist