1601 in literature

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The year 1601 in literature involved some significant events.

Events

• February 7 - The Lord Chamberlain's Men stage a performance of Shakespeare's Richard II at the Globe Theatre. The performance is specially commissioned (at a 40-shilling bonus) by the plotters in the Earl of Essex's rebellion of the following day. The plotters hope that the play, depicting the overthrow of a reigning monarch, will influence the public mood in their favor. The plot fails. Actor and company member Augustine Phillips is deposed by the Privy Council on February 17.
• Lancelot Andrewes becomes Dean of Westminster.
• Thomas Overbury meets Robert Carr, 1st Earl of Somerset, and they become firm friends.
• Tirso de Molina enters the monastery of San Antolín at Guadalajara, Spain.
• Tommaso Campanella, imprisoned in Italy for revolutionary plotting, is judged insane and spared the death penalty. He is sentenced to life imprisonment, and begins to write The City of the Sun.
• Philemon Holland publishes his translation of the Natural History of Pliny the Elder. When he composes Othello in the next year of so, Shakespeare exploits the book for references, including the "Anthropophagi" and the "Pontic Sea."

New books

• Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas - Historia general de los hechos de los Castellanos, volume 1
• Thomas Middleton - The Penniless Parliament of Threadbare Poets
• Achilles Tatius - The Adventures of Leucippe and Cleitophon (first printed edition of original Greek text)

New drama

• Anonymous (Sebastian Westcote?) - The Contention Between Liberality and Prodigality
• Thomas Dekker - Satiromastix
• Ben Jonson - The Poetaster performed, Cynthia's Revels published
• John Lyly - Love's Metamorphosis published
• John Marston - What You Will
• William Shakespeare - Twelfth Night, or What You Will; Hamlet (possible first performance)
• Robert Yarington - Two Lamentable Tragedies published

New poetry

• Robert Chester - Love's Martyr. The volume also contained fourteen poems by other hands, including:
  • William Shakespeare - The Phoenix and the Turtle
• Gervase Markham - Mary Magdalene's Tears
• John Weever - The Mirror of Martyrs, or The Life and Death of Sir John Oldcastle
• Bento Teixeira - Prosopopeia

Births

• January 8 - Baltasar Gracián, prose author (d. 1658)
• March 7 - Johann Michael Moscherosch, satirist (d. 1669)
• June 5 - John Trapp, Biblical commentator (d. 1669)
• July 17 - Emmanuel Maignan, theologian (d. 1676)
• August 22 - Georges de Scudéry, novelist, dramatist and poet (d. 1667)
• probable - François Tristan l'Hermite, dramatist (d. 1655)

Deaths

• January - Scipione Ammirato, historian (b. 1531)
• March 13 - Henry Cuffe, author and politician (b. 1563) (executed)
• April 10 - Mark Alexander Boyd, poet (b. 1562)
• August 19 - William Lambarde, legal writer (b. 1536)
• September - John Shakespeare, father of William Shakespeare (b. c. 1530)
• date unknown
  • John Hooker, English constitutionalist (b. c. 1527)
  • Gian Vincenzo Pinelli, humanist and book collector (b. 1535)
• probable - Thomas North, translator