1705 in literature

This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1705.

Events

April/May – Richard Steele, having left the army, marries a wealthy widow, Margaret Stretch.
July 29 – Richard Challoner enters the English College, Douai.
October 7 – William Somervile inherits his father's estate, where field sports will inspire much of his poetry.
October 30 – John Vanbrugh's play The Confederacy, adapted from the French, is first performed at his new London playhouse, The Queen's Theatre in the Haymarket.
December 27 – John Vanbrugh's play The Mistake is likewise adapted from the French and first performed at The Queen's Theatre.
unknown dates George Hickes' Linguarum veterum septentrionalium thesaurus grammatico-criticus et archæologicus vol. 2 (published in Oxford) includes the first published reference to Beowulf and the single surviving transcript of the Finnesburg Fragment. Chikamatsu Monzaemon (近松門左衛門) almost abandons writing kabuki plays and becomes a staff writer to the bunraku theatre in Osaka. Claude Pierre Goujet, religious historian and Jansenist, enters holy orders. William Walsh begins a correspondence with Alexander Pope. Work begins on Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, England, designed by the playwright John Vanbrugh for the Duke of Marlborough.

Joseph Addison – Remarks on Several Parts of Italy
Mary Astell – The Christian Religion as Profess'd by a Daughter of the Church
Dimitrie Cantemir – Historia Hieroglyphica (the first novel to use the Romanian language)
George Cheyne – Philosophical Principles of Natural Religion (deist)
Samuel Clarke – A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God
Mary Davys – The Fugitive
Daniel Defoe The Consolidator; or, Memoirs of Sundry Transactions from the World in the Moon A Second Volume of the Writings of the Author of the True-Born Englishman
John Dunton – The Life and Errors of John Dunton Late Citizen of London (humor)
Edmund Gibson – Family-Devotion
Charles Gildon – The Deist's Manual
Marie-Jeanne L'Héritier – La Tour ténébreuse, et les jours lumineux: contes anglois
Bernard de Mandeville – The Grumbling Hive (pirated edition)
Delarivière Manley – The Secret History, of Queen Zarah, and the Zarazians (roman à clef)
John Philips Blenheim The Splendid Shilling
Katherine Philips – Letters of Orinda to Poliarchus
John Toland – Primitive Constitution of the Christian Church

Thomas Baker – Hampstead Heath
Susannah Centlivre The Gamester (anonymously) The Basset-Table
Colley Cibber – The Careless Husband
Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon – Idoménée
John Dennis – Gibraltar, or the Spanish Adventure
George Granville – The British Enchanters
William Grimston, 1st Viscount Grimston – The Lawyer’s Fortune or Love in a Hollow Tree
Peter Anthony Motteux The Amorous Miser, or the Younger the Wiser Arsinoe, Queen of Cyprus (opera)
William Mountfort – Zelmane
Mary Pix (attributed) – The Conquest of Spain (adapted from William Rowley's All's Lost by Lust)
Nicholas Rowe – Ulysses
Richard Steele – The Tender Husband
John Vanbrugh – The Confederacy The Mistake