This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1726.
Events
- February â Lavinia Fenton makes her stage debut as Monimia in Thomas Otway's The Orphan at the Haymarket Theatre in London.
- April 5 â Publication takes place in London of Lewis Theobald's Shakespeare Restored, or A Specimen of the Many Errors As Well Committed as Unamended by Mr Pope in his Late Edition of this Poet; Designed Not only to correct the said Edition, but to restore the True Reading of Shakespeare in all the Editions ever yet published.
- May 10 â Voltaire leaves France for a three-year stay in Britain.
- May 25 â Britain's first circulating library is opened in Edinburgh by the poet and bookseller Allan Ramsay.
- July â Françoise-Louise de Warens converts to Catholicism to receive a church pension, and annuls her marriage.
- October 28 â Jonathan Swift's satirical novel Gulliver's Travels is published in London, anonymously in two volumes, as Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships. It sells out in a week.
- unknown dates
- The Teatro Valle opens in Rome.
- In China, 64 copies of a 5,020-volume encyclopedia, the Complete Classics Collection of Ancient China (å¤ä»ÂÃ¥ÂÂæÂ¸éÂÂæÂÂ), are printed, requiring the crafting of 250,000 movable type characters cast in bronze. The text was drafted by Chen Menglei in 1700âÂÂ05 and prepared for publication by around 1725.
New books
Fiction
Drama
Poetry
Non-fiction
Births
Deaths
- March 24 â Daniel Whitby, English theologian (born 1638)
- March 26 â Sir John Vanbrugh, English dramatist and architect (born 1664)
- April 5 â Ludwig Babenstuber, German theologian and philosopher (born 1660)
- April 26 â Jeremy Collier, English theologian and critic (born 1650)
- May 20 â Nicholas Brady, Irish poet (born 1659)
- July 5 â Domenico Viva, Italian theologian (born 1648)
- July 6 â Humfrey Wanley, English librarian and palaeographer (born 1672)
- August 12 â Charles Shadwell, English dramatist (year of birth unknown)
- December 2 â Samuel Penhallow, English historian (born 1665)
- December 11 â Jacques Bouillart, French Benedictine historian (born 1669)
References