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Sir Thomas North (28 May 1535c. 1604) was an England translator, military officer, lawyer, and justice of the peace. His translation into English of Plutarch's Parallel Lives is notable for being the main source text used by William Shakespeare for his Roman plays. He was the second son of Edward North, the 1st Baron North, and brother to Roger North. He maintained a long literary career, spanning six decades, but likely faced financial difficulties later in life due to receiving little inheritance. It has recently been hypothesised that all of his published translations may have influenced the Shakespearean theatrical canon, and that he may himself have known William Shakespeare.
Thomas likely studied at Peterhouse, Cambridge. In 1555, during the reign of the Catholic Queen Mary, he travelled in an embassy to Rome with Thomas Thirlby, Bishop of Ely ( c. 1506-1570), Anthony Browne, Sir Edward Carne ( c. 1500-1561), and Viscount Montague (1552-1592). Their mission was to reconcile England with the Pope, and North kept a journal of his travels. (2025). 9781683933052, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. ISBN 9781683933052
In 1557, Thomas became Master of the Revels at Lincoln's Inn. In 1560, North was praised by Jasper Heywood in his translation of Seneca's Thyestes for his "stately style" and "goodly grace". Heywood then listed him with other well-known writers at the Inns of Court, Thomas Sackville, 1st Earl of Dorset, and Christopher Yelverton. North may have written plays for Leicester's Men and his brother's accounts include a payment that may indicate that he put on a play with this troupe at court in 1580.
In 1574, Thomas accompanied his brother, Roger, 2nd Lord North, on a diplomatic mission to the French court in Lyon. He served as captain of a band of footmen in Ireland in 1580, fought with the Earl of Leicester in the Low Countries in 1587, was appointed to defend the Isle of Ely in the year of the Spanish Armada, and was in France in October of 1591 by the Earl of Essex, just before the Siege of Rouen. He returned to Ireland to help quell Tyrone's Rebellion in 1596.
His daughter, Elizabeth North, was posited as the inspiration for a character in Edmund Spenser's The Shepheardes Calender by Percy Long in 1905. This identification is based on the commonalities between this poem's "Rosalinde", and North's daughter who lived with her powerful uncle, Roger North, 2nd Baron North, at his estate of Kirtling Tower. As Long notes, Spenser admits the name Rosalinde was an anagram, and her name resolves to Elisa Nord: Elisa being a shortened version of Elizabeth, and Nord being French for North.
His name is on the roll of justices of the peace for Cambridge in 1592 and again in 1597. He was presented with a reward of £25 for his part in putting down Essex's Rebellion in 1601, and received a small pension (£40 a year) from Queen Elizabeth that same year.
North translated from a French copy of Guevara, but seems to have been well acquainted with the Spanish version. Marcus Aurelius had already been translated by John Bourchier, 2nd Baron Berners, but without reproducing the rhetorical artifices of the original. North's version, with its mannerisms and its constant use of antithesis, set the fashion which was to culminate in John Lyly's Euphues.
Linguistic evidence suggests that The Dial of Princes is a possible source for some passages in Titus Andronicus by William Shakespeare. Other biographical and historical parallels have led to the suggestion that North may have been the author of the now-lost play Titus and Vespasian, written in 1562, and that this was in turn the source for Shakespeare's own Titus Andronicus. Phrases from North's Dial of Princes may also appear in Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
North's Plutarch was reprinted for the Tudor Translations (1895), with an introduction by George Wyndham.
According to the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, "it is almost impossible to overestimate the influence of North's vigorous English on contemporary writers, and some critics have called him the first master of English prose".
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