Belleforest, François de (1530–1583)

French author and courtier. His Histoires Tragiques/Tragic Stories (1559–82) is a collection of tales, most of them translations from the Italian collection Novelle/Tales (1554) by the Italian writer Matteo Bandello. He also drew from other sources, notably 12th-century Danish writer Saxo Grammaticus, from whom he took the story of Hamlet.

There is good reason to believe that Shakespeare took several of his plots and incidents from Belleforest's book – notably elements of the plays Hamlet, Much Ado About Nothing, and Twelfth Night. A number of Belleforest's stories were translated as early as 1566 by the English writer Geoffrey Fenton as Certaine Tragicall Discourses.

He worked at the court of Queen Marguerite of Navarre, whose collection of tales The Heptameron (1559) may have inspired his own literary interests.