honest, manly, idiomatic English. No abstract of the Plutarchian
matter need be given here, as all the more important passages drawn upon
for the play are quoted in the footnotes to the text. These will show
that in most of the leading incidents the great Greek biographer is
closely followed, though in many cases these incidents are worked out
and developed with rare fertility of invention and art. It is very
significant that in the second half of _The Life of Julius Caesar_,
which Shakespeare draws upon very heavily, Plutarch emphasizes those
weaknesses of Caesar which are made so prominent in the play. Besides
this, in many places the Plutarchian form and order of thought, and also
the very words of North's racy and delectable English are retained, with
such an embalming for immortality as Shakespeare alone could give.[5]

[Footnote 1: Professor W. W. Skeat's _Shakespeare's Plutarch_ (The
Macmillan Company) gives these _Lives_ in convenient form with a text
based upon the edition of 1612.]

[Footnote 2: A Latin translation of Plutarch's _Lives_ was printed at
Rome as early as 1470, and there is evidence that through a Latin
version the work first attracted the attention of Amyot. But his famous
French version, first published in 1559, shows thorough familiarity with
the original Greek text.]

[Footnote 3: This title-page is given in facsimile as the frontispiece
of this volume.]

[Footnote 4: There is a famous copy of this edition in the Greenock
Library with the initials "W. S." at the top of the title-page and
seventeenth century manuscript notes in _The Life of Julius Caesar_. See
Skeat's _Shakespeare's Plutarch_, Introduction, p. xii.]

[Footnote 5: See Trench's _Lectures on Plutarch_, Leo's _Four Chapters
of North's Plutarch_, and Delius's _Shakespeare's Julius Caesar und
seine Quellen in Plutarch_ (_Shakespeare Jahrbuch_, XVII, 67).]

[Illustration:

THE LIVES
OF THE NOBLE GRECIANS
AND ROMANES, COMPARED
TOGETHER BY THAT GRAVE LEARNED
PHILOSOPHER AND HISTORIOGRAPHER,
_Plutarch of Chaeronea_:
Translated out of Greeke into French by IAMES AMIOT, Abbot of
Bellozane,
Bishop of Auxerre, one of the Kings priuie counsell, and great
Amner of France, and out of French into English, by
_Thomas North_.
Imprinted at London by Richard Field for
Bonham Norton.
1595.

]

In _Julius Caesar_ Shakespeare's indebtedness to North's Plutarch may be
summed up as extending to (1) the gener