1656 in literature

Events

• April 25 – In London, the Council of State, usually busy with larger matters, has taken on the censorship of individual books and orders Robert Tichborne, the Lord Mayor of the City of London, to burn a volume entitled Sportive Wit, or the Muses' Merriment for its "scandalous, lascivious, scurrilous, and profane matter".
• May 9 – Choice Drollery, Songs, and Sonnets is ordered to be destroyed by Britain's Council of State.
• July 27 – Baruch Spinoza is excluded from the Jewish religious community in Amsterdam.
• September – The Siege of Rhodes, Part I, by Sir William Davenant, the "first English opera", is performed in a private theatre at his home, Rutland House, in the City of London. This includes the innovative use of painted backdrops and the appearance of England's first professional actress, Mrs. Coleman as Ianthe.
• November 12 – John Milton marries Katherine Woodcock at St Mary Aldermanbury, London.
• unknown date – Two playbooks published in London in this year, The Careless Shepherdess and The Old Law, contain the first "play lists" or catalogs of published dramas ever issued in England.

  New books

Prose

• Cyrano de Bergerac – Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon
• Thomas Blount – Glossographia; or, a dictionary interpreting the hard words of whatsoever language now used in our refined English tongue
• Méric Casaubon – A Treatise Concerning Enthusiasm
• Margaret Cavendish –
• *A True Relation of my Birth, Breeding, and Life
• *Nature's Pictures
• William Dugdale – Antiquities of Warwickshire
• James Harrington – The Commonwealth of Oceana
• Thomas Hobbes – Questions concerning Liberty, Necessity and Chance
• Michael Maier – Themis aurea: the Laws of the Fraternity of the Rosie Crosse
• Marchamont Nedham – The Excellency of a Free State
• Adam Olearius – Vermehrte Newe Beschreibung Der Muscowitischen und Persischen Reyse So durch gelegenheit einer Holsteinischen Gesandtschaft an den Russischen Zaar und König in Persien geschehen
• Francis Osborne – Advice to a Son
• Blaise Pascal – Provincial Letters
• John Tradescant the Younger – Musæum Tradescantianum; or, a collection of rarities preserved at South-Lambeth neer London
• Gerard Winstanley – The Law of Freedom

  Children

• John Cotton – Spiritual Milk for Boston Babes

  Drama

• Thomas Dekker & John Ford – The Sun's Darling
• Thomas Goffe – Three Excellent Tragedies; The Careless Shepherdess
• Thomas Middleton, William Rowley, & Philip Massinger – The Old Law
• Molière – Le Dépit amoureux

  Poetry

• Abraham Cowley – The Miscellanies
• William Davenant – Wit and Drollery: Jovial Poems
• Andreas Gryphius – Kirchhofsgedanken
• Pierre Corneille – L'Imitation de Jésus-Christ

  Births

• January 1 – Silvester Jenks, English Catholic theologian and philosopher
• April 17 – William Molyneux, Irish natural philosopher and political writer
• August 3 – Jean Galbert de Campistron, French dramatist
• September 14 – Thomas Baker, English antiquary
• November 17 – Charles Davenant, English economist

  Deaths

• January 19 – Godfrey Goodman, English theologian and bishop
• August 24 – Aegidius Gelenius, German historian
• September 8 – Bishop Joseph Hall, English satirist
• October 3 – Myles Standish, American colonist
• December – John Edwards, Welsh Anglican priest and translator
• unknown date – Thomas Gage, English writer and cleric