1625 in literature

Events

• January 1 – The King's Men act Henry IV, Part 1 at Whitehall Palace.
• January 9 – Ben Jonson's masque The Fortunate Isles and Their Union is played before the English Court in London, becoming the last of the Jacobean era.
• February 12 – John Milton enters Christ's College, Cambridge, aged 16.
• March 27 – King James VI of Scotland and I of England and Ireland, patron of the King James Bible and essayist, dies at Theobalds House in England. He is succeeded by his son, King Charles I of England.
• April – Sir Richard Baker's Oxfordshire property is seized as a result of debts.
• August 2–September 26 – Playwright Cyril Tourneur becomes secretary to the Council of War. On October 8 he joins the catastrophic Cádiz expedition in another secretarial post under Sir Edward Cecil and on December 11 is put ashore from the returning fleet at Kinsale in Ireland, terminally ill.
• October – After the closure of the London public theaters for most of the year due to an outbreak of bubonic plague, a new company is formed as it abates with the cooler weather, Queen Henrietta's Men, under the patronage of the new King's wife.
• Late – The King's Men premiere Ben Jonson's satire on the new newsgathering enterprise The Staple of News, his first new play in almost a decade, at the Blackfriars Theatre in London.

  New books

Prose

• Francis Bacon – Complete Essays
• Alonso de Castillo Solórzano – Tardes entretenidas
• Hugo Grotius – De jure belli ac pacis
• Musaeum Hermeticum
• Ludovico Zuccolo – La Repubblica d' Evandria

  Drama

• John Fletcher and Philip Massinger – The Elder Brother
• Alexandre Hardy – Mariamne
• Ben Jonson
• *The Staple of News
• *The Fortunate Isles and Their Union
• Honorat de Bueil, seigneur de Racan – Les bergeries
• James Shirley – Love Tricks, or the School of Complement
• Joost van den Vondel – Palamedes

  Poetry

• Honoré d'Urfé – Sylvanire

  Births

• May 25
• *John Davies, Welsh translator into English
• *Ann, Lady Fanshawe, English memoirist
• June 23 – John Fell, English academic and bishop
• August 20 – Thomas Corneille, French dramatist
• unknown date – François Bernier, French travel writer and physician

  Deaths

• January 29 – Jacob Gretser, German Jesuit writer
• March 25 – Giambattista Marino, Italian epic poet
• March 27 – King James VI of Scotland and I of England and Ireland, Scottish literary patron
• June 1 – Honoré d'Urfé, French novelist and miscellanist
• August 29 – John Fletcher, English dramatist
• September – Thomas Lodge, English dramatist and physician
• September 6 – Thomas Dempster, Scottish historian
• September 20 – Heinrich Meibom, German poet and historian
• c. October – John Florio, English linguist and lexicographer
• November 27 – John Cameron, Scottish theologian