Francis Meres

Francis Meres (1565/6 – 29 January 1647) was an English churchman and author.

Francis Meres was born at Kirton in the Holland division of Lincolnshire in 1565. He was educated at Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he received a B.A. in 1587 and an M.A. in 1591. Two years later he was incorporated an M.A. of Oxford. His relative, John Meres, was high sheriff of Lincolnshire in 1596, and apparently helped him in the early part of his career. In 1602 he became rector of Wing in Rutland, where he also ran a school. Both his son, Francis, and his grandson, Edward, also received their B.A. and M.A. from Cambridge and became rectors.

Meres is especially well known for his Palladis Tamia, Wits Treasury (1598), a commonplace book that is important as a source on the Elizabethan poets, and more particularly because it is the first critical account of the poems and early plays of William Shakespeare. Its list of Shakespeare's plays is an important source for establishing their chronology. A sermon entitled Gods Arithmeticke (1597), and two translations from the Spanish of Luís de Granada entitled Granada's Devotion and the Sinners' Guide (1598) complete Meres' list of works.

Meres married a wife named Mary (1576/7–1631) whose surname is unknown, by whom he had a son, Francis, born in 1607. In Shakespeare's Sonnets (1904), Charlotte Stopes stated that Meres was the brother-in-law of John Florio; however investigation by George Greenwood suggests that Stopes was in error.

Meres died in 1647 and was buried in the parish church of St Peter and St Paul in Wing, Rutland.

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