1733 in literature

List of years in literature (table)
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In poetry 1730 1731 1732 1733 1734 1735 1736
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This article is a summary of the major literary events and publications of 1733.

Events

• Early – The first three epistles of Alexander Pope's poem An Essay on Man are published anonymously.
• May – Voltaire begins his long-term 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

Prose

• George Berkeley – The Theory of Vision
• 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
• George Cheyne – The English Malady: or, A treatise of nervous diseases of all kinds;

as spleen, vapours, lowness of spirits, hypochondriacal, and hysterical distempers, &c

• 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 (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" published in 1732, the fourth in 1744)
  • Of the Use of Riches: An Epistle to Lord Bathurst (also as Epistle to Bathurst)
  • The Impertinent
• Elizabeth Rowe – Letters Moral and Entertaining
• Jonathan Swift
  • On Poetry, a Rhapsody (contains explicit attacks on George II and 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

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) (posthumous)
• Eliza Haywood – The Opera of Operas (adaptation 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

• Anonymous – Verses Address'd to the Imitator of the First Satire of the Second Book of Horace (attrib. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, to Pope)
• John Banks – Poems on Several Occasions
• Samuel Bowden – Poetical Essays
• Mary Chandler – A Description of Bath
• Thomas Fitzgerald – Poems
• Matthew Green (as Peter Drake) – The Grotto
• James Hammond – An Elegy to a Young Lady
• Alexander Pope –The First Satire of the Second Book of Horace
• 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, German critic and bookseller (died 1811)
• August 22 – Jean-François Ducis, French dramatist (died 1816)
• September 5 – Christoph Martin Wieland, German poet (died 1813)
• Unknown date – Robert Lloyd, English poet and satirist (died 1764)

Deaths

• January 21 – Bernard de Mandeville, Dutch-born satirist and philosopher writing in English (born 1670)
• March 12 – Michel Le Quien, French theologian and historian (born 1661)
• March 13 – Mademoiselle Aïssé, Circassian-born French letter-writer (born c. 1694)
• May 10 – Jacob August Franckenstein, German lexicographer (born 1689)
• June 23 – Johann Jakob Scheuchzer, Swiss scholar (born 1672)
• August 16 – Matthew Tindal, English deist writer (born 1657)
• Unknown date – John Dunton, English writer and bookseller (born 1659)