François de Belleforest

François de Belleforest (* 1530 in Comminges , † January 1, 1583 in Paris ) was a French writer , poet and translator from the Renaissance period .

Belleforest comes from a poor background. His father was killed when he was seven years old. He spent some time at the court of Margaret of Navarre , traveled to Toulouse and Bordeaux (where he made the acquaintance of the humanist George Buchanan ), and then to Paris, where he came into contact with young poets such as Pierre de Ronsard , Jean Antoine de Baïf , Jean Dorat , Remy Belleau , Antoine du Verdier and Odet de Turnèbe made. In 1568 he became the historian of King Heinrich III. , but had to give up the post due to inaccuracies in his descriptions. He was then forced to make ends meet as a writer and flooded Paris with works on a wide variety of topics: cosmography, morality, literature and history, translations by Matteo Bandello , Giovanni Boccaccio , Antonio de Guevara , Francesco Guicciardini , Polydor Vergil , Saint Cyprian , Sebastian Münster , Achilleus Tatios , Cicero and Demosthenes into French. He is also the author of the first French shepherd novel, La Pyrénée (or La Pastorale amoureuse ) (1571), based on Diana by Jorge de Montemayor . His Grandes Annales are a polemical tract against the lawyer and writer François Hotman (1524–1590). In total, he has published more than 50 books.

His most successful work was probably his translation and adaptation of the seven-volume Histoires tragiques (1564–1582) by Matteo Bandello , which are based on the work of Pierre Boaistuau . One of these stories is believed to be one of the sources for Shakespeare's Hamlet .