Note 106 — Chapter III · ANCESTRY OF SHAKESPEARE’S ROMAN PLAYS

There were also translations in Italian, Spanish, and German; but none of them had anything like the literary importance of Amyot’s, and they were made from the Latin, not from the Greek. Of Hieronymus Boner, for instance, who published his Plutarch, Von dem Leben der allerdurchlauchtigsten Griechen und Romern (1st edition, Augsburg, 1534), it is misleading to say that he “anticipated” Amyot. Merzdorf writes of Boner’s versions of Greek authors generally (Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie) that he “turned them into German not from the original Greek but from Latin translations. Moreover, one must not expect from him any exact rendering, but rather a kind of paraphrase which he accommodates to the circumstances of the time.”