1622 in literature

Events

• January 6 – The Banqueting House, Whitehall, London, is opened with a performance of Ben Jonson's The Masque of Augurs designed by the building's architect, Inigo Jones.
• February 28 – Loiola, a Latin comedy mocking the Jesuits, is acted at Cambridge.
• March 12
• *The performance of Loiola, first seen in February, is repeated before King James I of England.
• *Teresa of Ávila, devotional writer, is canonized by Pope Gregory XV.
• June – Lucas Holstenius arrives in Britain to gather material for his Geographi Minores.
• November 19 – English writer and politician Sir Percy Herbert, created a baronet three days earlier, marries Elizabeth Craven, daughter of William Craven, a former Lord Mayor of London.
• unknown dates
• *Shakespeare's drama Othello is first published in the first quarto edition by Thomas Walkley in London, posthumously and nearly twenty years after the probable date of its first performance. New editions of four other Shakespeare plays in quarto are also issued this year, publishers being presumably aware of the imminent publication of the First Folio.
• *James Mabbe publishes an English translation of Mateo Alemán's novel Guzmán de Alfarache.

  New books

Prose

• Juan Ruiz de Alarcón – El tejedor de Segovia
• Francis Bacon – The Historie of the Raigne of King Henry the Seventh
• Jacob Boehme – De Signatura Rerum
• Elizabeth Knyvet Clinton, Countess of Lincoln – The Countess of Lincoln's Nursery
• Marie de Gournay – Egalité des Hommes et des Femmes
• Richard Hawkins – Voiage into the South Sea
• Henry Peacham – The Compleat Gentleman

  Drama

• Giambattista Andreini – The Centaur
• Thomas Dekker and Philip Massinger – The Virgin Martyr
• John Fletcher and Massinger – Beggars' Bush
• Fletcher and Massinger – The Spanish Curate
• Ben Jonson – The Masque of Augurs
• Thomas Middleton and William Rowley – The Changeling
• Thomas Middleton and John Webster – Anything for a Quiet Life
• William Rowley – The Birth of Merlin

  Poetry

• Gervase Markham and William Sampson – Herod and Antipater
• Thomas May – The Heir
• John Taylor – The Water Cormorant His Complaint
• George Wither – Faire-Virtue, The Mistresse of Phil Arete

  Non-fiction

• Francis Bacon – History of the Reign of King Henry VII

  Births

• January 15 – Molière, French dramatist
• February 24 – Johannes Clauberg, German philosopher and theologian
• March 28 – Ermes di Colorêt, Italian nobleman and writer
• April 11 – Jan van Vliet, Dutch philologist
• April 17 – Henry Vaughan, Welsh poet writing in English, and Thomas Vaughan, Welsh philosopher
• September 22 – Jacques Savary, French commercial economist
• December 24 – Francesc Fontanella, Catalan poet and dramatist
• Unknown date – Gilbert Mabbot, English journalist and licenser of the press 1647–49

  Deaths

• April 14 – Antoine de Gaudier, French theologian
• June 4 – Péter Révay, Hungarian nobleman, poet and historian
• August 21 – Juan de Tassis y Peralta, 2nd Count of Villamediana, Spanish poet
• October – Sir George Buck, English antiquary and historian
• October 11 – Conrad Vetter, German polemicist
• November 4 – Francisco Rodrigues Lobo, Portuguese poet and bucolic writer
• December 19 – Benedetto Justiniani, Italian theologian
• Probable year of death
• *Henry Ainsworth, English scholar and cleric
• *Robert Carliell, English didactic poet
• *John Owen, Welsh writer of Latin epigrams