1605
year
1605 (MDCV) was a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar and a common year starting on Tuesday of the Julian calendar, the 1605th year of the Common Era (CE) and Anno Domini (AD) designations, the 605th year of the 2nd millennium, the 5th year of the 17th century, and the 6th year of the 1600s decade. As of the start of 1605, the Gregorian calendar was 10 days ahead of the Julian calendar, which remained in localized use until 1923.
Events
January–March
January 1 – William Shakespeare's play A Midsummer Night's Dream, copyrighted 1600, is given its earliest recorded performance, and witnessed by the Viscount Dorchester.
January 7 – Shakespeare's play Henry V, copyrighted 1600, is given its earliest recorded performance, presented by the Lord Chamberlain's Men for King James I of England.
January 15 – Shakespeare's play Love's Labour's Lost, copyrighted 1598, is given its second recorded performance, probably presented at the home of the Earl of Southampton for Queen Anne, wife of King James I of England.
January 16 – The first part of Miguel de Cervantes' satire on the theme of chivalry, Don Quixote (El ingenioso hidalgo don Quixote de la Mancha, "The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha"), is published in Madrid. One of the first significant novels in the western literary tradition, it becomes a global bestseller almost at once.
February 3 – The 1605 Keichō earthquake, of estimated 7.9 magnitude, strikes Japan south of the island of Honshu, and triggers a tsunami that washes away hundreds of houses and kills thousands of people.
February 10 – Shakespeare's play The Merchant of Venice is given its earliest recorded performance, presented by the King's Men players at the Palace of Whitehall for King James I of England. A second performance is given on February 12, Shrove Tuesday, at the King's request.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “1605” is year. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through year, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “year” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6741. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1605, 1923, 1600 and 1598.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “1605” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.