1607 in literature

The year 1607 in literature involved some significant events.

Events

• 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 Capt. 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 Red Dragon.
• 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.

New books

• William Alabaster – Apparatus in Revelationem Jesu Christi
• John Cowell – The Interpreter (suppressed by the English House of Commons for excessive royalism)
• Thomas Dekker – The Seven Deadly Sins of London
• Michael Drayton – The Legend of Great Cromwell
• Edward Grimeston – A General Inventory of the History of France
• 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 (part 1)

New drama

• William Alexander, 1st Earl of Stirling – The Monarchic Tragedies, second edition; adds The Alexandrean and Julius Caesar to his previously-published closet dramas Croesus and Darius
• Anonymous – Claudius Tiberius Nero
• Anonymous – The Fair Maid of the Exchange published
• Barnabe Barnes – The Devil's Charter
• Francis Beaumont – The Knight of the Burning Pestle
• Beaumont and Fletcher – The Woman Hater published; the earliest of their collaborations to appear in print
• Thomas Campion – Lord Hay's Masque
• George Chapman – Bussy D'Ambois published
• 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 published
• Thomas Heywood – The Fair Maid of the Exchange published
• Ben Jonson – Volpone published
• John Marston – What You Will published
• Thomas Middleton – Michaelmas Term performed; The Phoenix published; The Puritan published as "written by W.S."; The Revenger's Tragedy published
• Edward Sharpham – Cupid's Whirligig
• Thomas Tomkis – Lingua published
• George Wilkins – The Miseries of Enforced Marriage published

Births

• March 8 – Johann von Rist, German poet (died 1667)
• July 10 – Philippe Labbe, French Jesuit writer (died 1667)
• October 4 – Francisco de Rojas Zorrilla, Spanish dramatist (died c. 1660)
• November 1 – Georg Philipp Harsdorffer, German poet and translator (died 1658)
• November 5 – Anna Maria van Schurman, Dutch poet (died 1678)
• November 15 – Madeleine de Scudéry, French writer (died 1701)
• Unknown dates
  • Alaol, Bengali poet (died 1680)
  • Antoine Gombaud, French essayist (died 1684)
  • Filadelfo Mugnos, Italian historian (died 1675)

Deaths

• January 6 – Guidobaldo del Monte, Italian philosopher (born 1545)
• May – Sir Edward Dyer, English poet (born 1543)
• June – Thomas Newton English physician, clergyman, poet, author and translator (born c. 1542)
• June 19 – Johannes Bertelius, historian of Luxembourg (born 1544)
• June 30 – Caesar Baronius, Italian ecclesiastical historian (born 1538)
• July 6 – Achille Gagliardi, Italian theologian (born 1537)
• July 7 – Penelope Rich, Lady Rich, English noblewoman, inspiration for Sir Philip Sidney's "Stella" (born 1563)
• October 31 - Wawrzyniec Grzymała Goślicki, Polish philosopher (born c. 1540)
• Unknown dates
  • Cuthbert Burby, English publisher and bookseller
  • Dinko Ranjina, Croatian poet (born 1536)
• Probable year of death – Henry Chettle, English dramatist (born c. 1564)