1733 in literature

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The year 1733 in literature involved some significant events and new books.

Events

• Antoine François Prévost (Abbé Prévost) arrives in London, where he will edit Le Pour et centre.
• Voltaire begins his relationship with Emilie de Breteuil, marquise du Chatelet.
• Laurence Sterne enters Jesus College, Cambridge.
• Romeo and Juliet becomes the first of Shakespeare's plays to be performed in America.
• Charles Macklin makes his debut at Drury Lane Theatre in The Recruiting Officer.

New books

• Anonymous - Verses Address'd to the Imitator of the First Satire of the Second Book of Horace (attrib. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu) (to Pope, below)
• George Berkeley - The Theory of Vision
• Samuel Bowden - Poetical Essays
• James Bramston - The Man of Taste (answer to Pope from 1732)
• John Durant Breval as "Joseph Gay" - Morality in Vice (part of Curll's continuing war with John Gay)
• Peter Browne - Things Supernatural and Divine Conceived by Analogy with things Natural and Human
• Mary Chandler - A Description of Bath
• Richard Graves - The Spiritual Quixote
• James Hammond - An Elegy to a Young Lady
• John Hervey, 2nd Baron Hervey - An Epistle from a Nobleman to a Doctor of Divinity
• George Lyttelton, 1st Baron Lyttelton - Advice to a Lady
• Samuel Madden - Memoirs of the Twentieth Century (a roman à clef about George II)
• David Mallet - Of Verbal Criticism (to Pope)
• Thomas Newcomb - The Woman of Taste (reaction to Pope's Epistle of 1732)
• Alexander Pope
  • "Of the Nature and State of Man, with Respect to" (3) "Society" (continuation of Essay on Man; the first two "epistles" were published in 1732 & the fourth in 1744)
  • Of the Use of Riches: An Epistle to Lord Bathurst (aka the Epistle to Bathurst)
  • The First Satire of the Second Book of Horace
  • The Impertinent
• Elizabeth Rowe - Letters Moral and Entertaining
• Jonathan Swift
  • On Poetry, a Rhapsody (contained explicit attacks on George II, as well as many of the "dunces", resulting in arrests and prosecution.)
  • The Life and Genuine Character of Doctor Swift
• Voltaire - Letters Concerning the English Nation
• Isaac Watts - Philosophical Essays

New drama

• John Durant Breval - The Rape of Helen (printed 1737)
• Charles Coffey - The Boarding School (performed and published)
• Henry Fielding - The Miser (from Molière)
• John Gay - Achilles (opera) (posth.)
• Eliza Haywood - The Opera of Operas (adapt. of Fielding's Tom Thumb, with a pro-Walpole "reconciliation" scene) (opera)
• John Kelly - Timon in Love
• Edward Phillips
  • The Livery Rake
  • The Mock Lawyer
  • The Stage Mutineers
• António José da Silva - Vida do Grande Dom Quixote de la Mancha e do Gordo Sancho Pança
• Lewis Theobald (ed.) - The Works of Shakespeare

Poetry

• John Banks - Poems on Several Occasions
• Thomas Fitzgerald - Poems
• Matthew Green as "Peter Drake" - The Grotto
• Mary Masters - Poems
• See also 1733 in poetry

Births

• January 12 - Antoine-Marin Lemierre, French poet and dramatist (died 1793)
• March 13 - Joseph Priestley, English natural philosopher and theologian (died 1804)
• March 18 - Christoph Friedrich Nicolai, critic and bookseller (died 1811)
• August 22 - Jean-François Ducis, dramatist (died 1816)
• September 5 - Christoph Martin Wieland, German poet (died 1813)
• date unknown - Robert Lloyd, poet and satirist (died 1764)

Deaths

• January 19 - Bernard de Mandeville, satirist and philosopher (born 1670)
• March 12 - Michel Le Quien, theologian and historian (born 1661)
• March 13 - Mademoiselle Aïssé, letter-writer (born c.1694)
• June 23 - Johann Jakob Scheuchzer, scholar (born 1672)
• August 16 - Matthew Tindal, deist writer (born 1657)
• date unknown
  • John Dunton, writer and booksseller (born 1659)
  • Bernard de Mandeville, philosopher (born 1670)