Sir Thomas North
born May 28, 1535, London, Eng.
died 1601?
English translator whose version of Plutarch’s
Bioi parallēloi (Parallel Lives) was the source
for many of William Shakespeare’s plays.
North may have been a student at Peterhouse,
Cambridge; in 1557 he was entered at Lincoln’s
Inn, London, where he joined a group of young
lawyers interested in translating. In 1574 North
accompanied his brother on a diplomatic mission
to France. Thomas North had an extensive
military career: he fought twice in Ireland as
captain (1582 and 1596–97), served in the Low
Countries in defense of the Dutch against the
Spanish (1585–87), and trained militia against
the threatened invasion of England by the
Spanish Armada in 1588. He was knighted about
1596–97, was justice of the peace for Cambridge,
and was pensioned by Queen Elizabeth in 1601.
In 1557 North translated, under the title The
Diall of Princes, a French version of Antonio de
Guevara’s Reloj de príncipes o libro aureo del
emperador Marco Aurelio (1529; “The Princes’
Clock, or The Golden Book of Emperor Marcus
Aurelius”). Although North retained Guevara’s
mannered style, he was also capable of quite a
different kind of work. His translation of Asian
beast fables from the Italian, The Morall
Philosophie of Doni (1570), for example, was a
rapid and colloquial narrative. His The Lives of
the Noble Grecians and Romanes, translated in
1579 from Jacques Amyot’s French version of
Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, has been described as
one of the earliest masterpieces of English
prose. Shakespeare borrowed from North’s Lives
for his Roman plays—Antony and Cleopatra, Julius
Caesar, Timon of Athens, and Coriolanus—and, in
fact, he put some of North’s prose directly into
blank verse, with only minor changes.
