June 23 – The London theatres close and apart from a brief spell around January 1593 remain so for about 16 months due to an epidemic of bubonic plague.
September 3 – The English writer Robert Greene dies in London of a "banquet of Rhenish wine and pickled herring",[1] having apparently completed Greene's Groats-Worth of Wit (published soon after), including a reference to "an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers", taken to be the first published (critical) reference to Shakespeare as a playwright.
September 26 – Rivales is performed again by members of Christ Church, with Queen Elizabeth I of England in the audience, during her second visit to the University of Oxford.
Antonio Agustin – Dialoghi intorno alle medaglie inscrittioni et attre antichità, with woodcuts by Geronima Parasole (the first known printed book with illustrations by a woman)
Thomas Kyd – The Spanish Tragedy (undated first printing, almost certainly between October and December in this year; first performed around 1587; first recorded performance November in this year)
^Hutchins, Robert Maynard; Hazlitt, W. Carew, eds. (1952). The Essays of Michel Eyquem de Montaigne. Great Books of the Western World. Vol. twenty–five. Trans. Charles Cotton. Encyclopædia Britannica. p. v. He had his son awakened each morning by 'the sound of a musical instrument'