1705 in literature

This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1705.

Events

 * April/May – Richard Steele, having left the army, marries a wealthy widow, Margaret Stretch.
 * July 29 – Richard Challoner enters the English College, Douai.
 * October 7 – William Somervile inherits his father's estate, where field sports will inspire much of his poetry.
 * October 30 – John Vanbrugh's play The Confederacy, adapted from the French, is first performed at his new London playhouse, The Queen's Theatre in the Haymarket.
 * December 27 – John Vanbrugh's play The Mistake is likewise adapted from the French and first performed at The Queen's Theatre.
 * unknown dates
 * George Hickes' Linguarum veterum septentrionalium thesaurus grammatico-criticus et archæologicus vol. 2 (published in Oxford) includes the first published reference to Beowulf and the single surviving transcript of the Finnesburg Fragment.
 * Chikamatsu Monzaemon (近松門左衛門) almost abandons writing kabuki plays and becomes a staff writer to the bunraku theatre in Osaka.
 * Claude Pierre Goujet, religious historian and Jansenist, enters holy orders.
 * William Walsh begins a correspondence with Alexander Pope.
 * Work begins on Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, England, designed by the playwright John Vanbrugh for the Duke of Marlborough.

Prose

 * Joseph Addison – Remarks on Several Parts of Italy
 * Mary Astell – The Christian Religion as Profess'd by a Daughter of the Church
 * Dimitrie Cantemir – Historia Hieroglyphica (the first novel to use the Romanian language)
 * George Cheyne – Philosophical Principles of Natural Religion (deist)
 * Samuel Clarke – A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God
 * Mary Davys – The Fugitive
 * Daniel Defoe
 * The Consolidator; or, Memoirs of Sundry Transactions from the World in the Moon
 * A Second Volume of the Writings of the Author of the True-Born Englishman
 * John Dunton – The Life and Errors of John Dunton Late Citizen of London (humor)
 * Edmund Gibson – Family-Devotion
 * Charles Gildon – The Deist's Manual
 * Marie-Jeanne L'Héritier – La Tour ténébreuse, et les jours lumineux: contes anglois
 * Bernard de Mandeville – The Grumbling Hive (pirated edition)
 * Delarivière Manley – The Secret History, of Queen Zarah, and the Zarazians (roman à clef)
 * John Philips
 * Blenheim
 * The Splendid Shilling
 * Katherine Philips – Letters of Orinda to Poliarchus
 * John Toland – Primitive Constitution of the Christian Church

Drama

 * Thomas Baker – Hampstead Heath
 * Susannah Centlivre
 * The Gamester (anonymously)
 * The Basset-Table
 * Colley Cibber – The Careless Husband
 * Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon – Idoménée
 * John Dennis – Gibraltar, or the Spanish Adventure
 * George Granville – The British Enchanters
 * William Grimston, 1st Viscount Grimston – The Lawyer’s Fortune or Love in a Hollow Tree
 * Peter Anthony Motteux
 * The Amorous Miser, or the Younger the Wiser
 * Arsinoe, Queen of Cyprus (opera)
 * William Mountfort – Zelmane
 * Mary Pix (attributed) – The Conquest of Spain (adapted from William Rowley's All's Lost by Lust)
 * Nicholas Rowe – Ulysses
 * Richard Steele – The Tender Husband
 * John Vanbrugh –
 * The Confederacy
 * The Mistake

Poetry
See also 1705 in poetry
 * Richard Blackmore – Eliza
 * Daniel Defoe
 * The Double Welcome
 * The Dyet of Poland
 * Complete Tang Poems
 * Charles Johnson – The Queen; a Pindaric Ode
 * Matthew Prior – An English Padlock
 * Ned Ward – Hudibras Redidivus
 * Isaac Watts – Horae Lyricae

Births

 * January 21 – Isaac Hawkins Browne, English poet (died 1760)
 * February 13 – Franciszka Urszula Radziwillowa, Polish dramatist (died 1753)
 * May – Ambrosius Stub, Danish poet (died 1758)
 * June 21 – David Hartley, English philosopher (died 1757)
 * September 2 – Abraham Tucker (Edward Search), English philosopher (died 1774)
 * October 29 – Gerhardt Friedrich Müller, German historian (died 1783)
 * November 23 – Thomas Birch, English historian (died 1766)
 * probable – Stephen Duck, English poet (died 1756)

Deaths

 * January 4 – Madame d'Aulnoy, French author of fairy tales (born c. 1650)
 * January 10 – Étienne Pavillon, French lawyer and poet (born 1632)
 * February 5 – Philipp Jakob Spener, German theologian (born 1635)
 * April 2 – John Howe, English theologian (born 1630)
 * May 5 – Johann Ernst Glück, German writer and translator (born 1654)
 * June 10 – Michael Wigglesworth, English poet (born 1631)
 * October 17 – Ninon de l'Enclos, French courtesan and salonnière (born 1620)
 * November 10 – Justine Siegemund, German writer on midwifery (born 1636)