1733 in literature

This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1733.

Events

February 20 – The first epistle of Alexander Pope's poem An Essay on Man is published anonymously.
March 29 – The second epistle of Pope's An Essay on Man is published.
October – Charles Macklin makes his debut at Drury Lane Theatre in The Recruiting Officer.
Venetian playwright Carlo Goldoni burns his first play, the tragedy Amalasunta, due to its negative reception in Milan.

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
Thomas-Simon Gueullette – Les Mille et une Heures, contes péruviens (Peruvian Tales: Related in One Thousand and One Hours, by One of the Select Virgins of Cusco)
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 Singer 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

William Bond – The Tuscan Treaty
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 (died 1732) – Achilles (opera)
Eliza Haywood – The Opera of Operas (adaptation of Fielding's Tom Thumb, with a pro-Walpole "reconciliation" scene) (opera)
William Havard – Scanderbeg
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
Lewis Theobald – The Fatal Secret

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

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)

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)