John Heminge and Henry Condell publish thirty-six Shakespeare plays in the First Folio

The sculptor and architect Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini is given the task of adding the drama of baroque to the newly completed St Peter's in Rome

Pierre Corneille's play Le Cid, popular with Paris audiences, hinges on the conflict between duty and love

French dramatist Jean Racine's first great success, Andromaque, finds tragic drama in a quadrangle of love

Molière falls fatally ill when acting in his own play Le Malade Imaginaire

Italian dramatist Carlo Goldoni makes a success of plays in the ancient commedia dell'arte tradition

The intensely dramatic music of Gluck's Orfeo ed Eurydice introduces a much needed reform in the conventions of opera

Oliver Goldsmith's play She Stoops to Conquer is produced in London's Covent Garden theatre

Goethe's play Götz von Berlichingen, a definitive work of Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress), has its premiere in Berlin

Figaro makes his first appearance on stage in Beaumarchais' The Barber of Seville

Richard Brinsley Sheridan's second play, The School for Scandal, is an immediate success in London's Drury Lane theatre

In Brook Watson and the Shark John Singleton Copley creates the most intensely dramatic of his modern history paintings

Friedrich von Schiller's youthful and anarchic play The Robbers causes a sensation when performed in Mannheim

US painter and author William Dunlap has great success with his comedy The Father; or, American Shandyism

The Swedish king Gustavus III is assassinated at a midnight masquerade in Stockholm – an event later dramatized by Verdi

Goethe and Schiller become friends, and together create the movement known as Weimar classicism

Victor Hugo's romantic drama Hernani provokes a riot in the Paris audience on the first night

Russian poet Alexander Pushkin publishes a grand historical drama, Boris Godunov

The Inspector General, a farce by Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol satirising Russian offialdom, has tsar Nicholas I in the audience for the premiere

William Hickling Prescott brings the Conquistadors dramatically to life in his 3-volume History of the Conquest of Mexico

US inventor Elisha Otis dramatically demonstrates his new safety elevator, cutting the rope suspending his platform in New York's Crystal Palace

Longfellow's narrative poem Paul Revere's Ride dramatizes a turning point at the start of the American Revolution

Hungarian physician Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis publishes his discovery that deaths from puerperal fever can be dramatically reduced by a strict hand-washing routine

Mrs Henry Wood publishes her first novel, East Lynne, which becomes the basis of the most popular of all Victorian melodramas

English actor Henry Irving plays what becomes one of his most famous parts, that of Mathias in the melodrama The Bells