1727 in literature

Events

• November 22 – Richard Savage is arrested for the murder of James Sinclair in a drunken quarrel the previous night. He escapes the death penalty through the intercession of Frances, Countess of Hertford, and others.
• December 13 – Lewis Theobald's Double Falshood; or, The Distrest Lovers, claimed as an adaptation of the otherwise lost Cardenio by Shakespeare and Fletcher, is acted at Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, London. It will be printed the following year.
• unknown date – Publisher Edmund Curll is convicted under English law for publishing an English translation of Venus in the Cloister under the common law offence of disturbing the peace, setting a legal precedent for prosecutions for obscenity.

  New books

Prose

• Anonymous – Memoirs of the Court of Liliput
• Henry Baker – The Universe, a Poem intended to restrain the Pride of Man
• Elizabeth Boyd – Variety
• Cadwallader Colden – The History of the Five Indian Nations
• Mary Davys – The Accomplished Rake
• Daniel Defoe
• *Conjugal Lewdness
• *An Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions
• *A New Family Instructor
• John Gay – Fables
• Madeleine-Angélique de Gomez – Anecdotes persanes, dédiées au roy
• Eliza Haywood
• *Philidore and Placentia
• *Cleomelia
• *The Perplex'd Dutchess
• *The Secret History of the Present Intrigues of the Court of Caramania
• Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon – A Collection of Several Tracts
• Madame de Lambert – Réflexions nouvelles sur les femmes, ou Métaphysique d'amour
• John Oldmixon – Clarendon and Whitlock Compar'd
• Arabella Plantin – The Ingrateful
• James Ralph – The Tempest
• Henry St. John – The Occasional Writer
• Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, John Arbuthnot, et al. – Miscellanies in Prose and Verse
• Évrard Titon du Tillet – Le Parnasse François
• William Warburton – The Legal Judicature in Chancery Stated
• José Francisco de Isla
• *Juventud triunfante
• *El tapabocas
• Diego de Torres Villarroel – Visiones y visitas de Torres con Francisco de Quevedo por la corte

  Drama

• John Durant Breval – The Strollers
• Philippe Néricault Destouches – Le Philosophe Marié
• Philip Frowde – The Fall of Saguntum
• James Moore Smythe – The Rival Modes
• Lewis Theobald – The Rape of Proserpine

  Poetry

• Christopher Pitt – Poems and Translations
• Alexander Pope – Several Copies of Verses on Occasion of Mr. Gulliver's Travels
• James Thomson
• *A Poem Sacred to the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton
• *Summer
• John Wright – Spiritual Songs for Children

  Births

• March 7 – André Morellet, French economist and writer
• October 27 – Hester Chapone, English writer of conduct books
• December 27 – Arthur Murphy, Irish biographer
• December – John Hoole, English translator

  Deaths

• January 17 – Johann Christoph Wichmannshausen, German philologist
• February 13 – William Wotton, English scholar, target of Jonathan Swift
• September 17 – Glückel of Hameln, German diarist
• September 25 – Sarah Kemble Knight, diarist in colonial Massachusetts