Seventeenth Century

±1601AD Shakespeare’s Hamlet

1602AD Dutch East India Company chartered

±1603-8AD Shakespeare begins his great tragedies (Othello, Macbeth and King Lear)

1604AD Guy Fawkes executed

1605AD Cervantes’s Don Quixote (part 1)

1607AD Montiverdi’s opera Orfeo

1608AD Hamlet performed aboard The Dragon at Sierra Leona and off the east coast of South Africa. Richard II was done en route.

1609AD Kepler’s Astronomica Nova. Galileo’s telescope. Lope de Vega’s The New Art of Writing Plays published. Shakespeare’s co. performs indoors at the Blackfriars.

1610AD A “very pretty comedy” was played in the three days on board a Portuguese ship while passing the Cape.

1611AD King James version of the Bible. Shakespeare’s The Tempest performed

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