1726 in literature

This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1726.

Events

February – Lavinia Fenton makes her stage debut as Monimia in Thomas Otway's The Orphan at the Haymarket Theatre in London.
April 5 – Publication takes place in London of Lewis Theobald's Shakespeare Restored, or A Specimen of the Many Errors As Well Committed as Unamended by Mr Pope in his Late Edition of this Poet; Designed Not only to correct the said Edition, but to restore the True Reading of Shakespeare in all the Editions ever yet published.
May 10 – Voltaire leaves France for a three-year stay in Britain.
May 25 – Britain's first circulating library is opened in Edinburgh by the poet and bookseller Allan Ramsay.
July – Françoise-Louise de Warens converts to Catholicism to receive a church pension, and annuls her marriage.
October 28 – Jonathan Swift's satirical novel Gulliver's Travels is published in London, anonymously in two volumes, as Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships. It sells out in a week.
unknown dates
*The Teatro Valle opens in Rome.
*In China, 64 copies of a 5,020-volume encyclopedia, the Complete Classics Collection of Ancient China, are printed, requiring the crafting of 250,000 movable type characters cast in bronze. The text was drafted by Chen Menglei in 1700–05 and prepared for publication by around 1725.

John Balguy – A letter to a Deist concerning the Beauty and Excellency of Moral Virtue, and the Support and Improvement which it receives from the Christian Religion
Joseph Butler – Fifteen Sermons
Anthony Collins – The Scheme of Literal Prophecy
Corporate authorship – The Craftsman
Daniel Defoe
*The Political History of the Devil
*A System of Magick
John Dennis – The Stage Defended
José Francisco de Isla – Papeles critico-apologéticos
William Law
*The Absolute Unlawfulness of the Stage
*A Practical Treatise upon Christian Perfection
Samuel Penhallow – History of the Wars of New-England with the Eastern Indians
William Penn
*Fruits of a Father's Love
*A Collection of the Works of William Penn
* – The Discovery
Jean-Philippe Rameau – Nouveau système de musique théorique
Martín Sarmiento – Reflexiones sobre el Diccionario de la lengua castellana que compuso la Real Academia en el año de 1726
George Shelvocke – A Voyage Round the World by Way of the Great South Sea
Joseph Spence – An Essay on Popes' Odyssey
Lewis Theobald – Shakespeare Restored
Diego de Torres Villarroel – ''El ermitaño y Torres''