The year 1656 in literature involved some significant events.

Events

• September - performance of The Siege of Rhodes, Part I by Sir William Davenant, the "first English opera"
• November 12 - John Milton marries Katherine Woodcock.
• Baruch Spinoza is excluded from the Jewish religious community.
• In London, the Council of State, usually busy with larger matters, takes on the censorship of individual books. On April 25 it orders the Lord Mayor of the City of London to burn a volume titled Sportive Wit, or the Muses' Merriment for its "scandalous, lascivious, scurrilous, and profane matter." On May 9 an item called Choice Drollery, Songs, and Sonnets is similarly ordered destroyed.
• Two playbooks published in London in this year, The Careless Shepherdess and The Old Law, contain the first "play lists" or catalogues of published dramas ever issued in England.

New books

• Cyrano de Bergerac - Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon
• Méric Casaubon - A Treatise Concerning Enthusiasm
• Margaret Cavendish - Nature's Pictures
• Andreas Gryphius - Kirchlzofsgedanken (lyrics)
• James Harrington - The Commonwealth of Oceana
• Thomas Hobbes - Questions concerning Liberty, Necessity and Chance
• Elizabeth Major - Honey on the Rod
• Marchmont Nedham - The Excellency of a Free State
• Adam Olearius, German traveller - Vermehrte Newe Beschreibung Der Muscowitischen und Persischen Reyse So durch gelegenheit einer Holsteinischen Gesandtschaft an den Russischen Zaar und König in Persien geschehen
• Francis Osborne - Advice to a Son (an anti-marriage book, condemned and burned for immorality)
• Gerard Winstanley - The Law of Freedom
• Blaise Pascal - Provincial Letters (first letter in series — completed in March 1657)

Published plays

• Robert Cox - John Swabber the Seaman
• Thomas Dekker & John Ford - The Sun's Darling
• Thomas Goffe - Three Excellent Tragedies; The Careless Shepherdess
• Sir William Lower - Horatius
• Thomas Middleton, William Rowley, & Philip Massinger - The Old Law
• Walter Montague - The Accomplished Woman
• Edmund Prestwich - The Hectors, or the False Challenge

New poetry

• Abraham Cowley - The Miscellanies
• William Davenant - Wit and Drollery: Jovial Poems

Births

• September 14 - Thomas Baker (antiquarian), antiquarian author (died 1746)
• date unknown - Charles Davenant, economist, son of Sir William Davenant (died 1714)
• date unknown - Jean Galbert de Campistron, dramatist (died 1723)

Deaths

• September 8 - Bishop Joseph Hall (English Bishop and satyrist), satirist (born 1574)
• October 3 - Myles Standish, American colonist, best known through the Longfellow poem (born c.1584)