NORTH, SIR THOMAS (1 535 ?-16o1 ?) , English translator of Plutarch, second son of the ist Baron North, was born about 1535. He is supposed to have been a student of Peterhouse, Cam bridge, and was entered at Lincoln's Inn in 1557. In 1574 he accompanied his brother, Lord North, on a visit to the French court. He served as captain in the year of the Armada, and was knighted about three years later. He was a justice of the peace for Cambridge in 1592 and again in 1597, and he received a pension (i4o a year) from the queen in 1601. He translated, in 1557, Guevara's Reloj de Principes (commonly known as Libro Aureo) (see GUEVARA) under the title of Diall of Princes. The English of this work is one of the earliest specimens of the ornate, copious and pointed style for which educated young Englishmen had acquired a taste in their continental travels and studies. With its mannerisms and constant use of antithesis, it set the fashion which was to culminate in Lyly's Euphues. His next work was The Morall Philosophie of Doni (157o), a translation of an Italian collection of eastern fables. The first edition of his
translation of Plutarch, from the French of Jacques Amyot, ap peared in 1579. The first edition was dedicated to Queen Eliza beth, and was followed by other editions in 1595 and 1603, con taining in each case fresh Lives. The influence of North's vigorous English on contemporary writers was very great, and some critics have called him the first master of English prose. The book formed the source from which Shakespeare drew the materials for his Julius Caesar, Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra. It is in the last-named play that he follows the Lives most closely, whole speeches being taken direct from North.
See Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans: English eel. by Sir T. North (in Tudor Translations, 1895) ; Shakespeare's Plu tarch (a selection ed. C. F. T. Brooke, 19o9) ; The Diall of Princes (reprinted 1921) ; F. Bushby, Three Men of Tudor Times (igii).