Sir Thomas North

Sir Thomas North (1535-1601?), English translator, born in London. The younger son of a noble family, North served as justice of the peace in Cambridgeshire, was knighted about 1591, and in 1601 received a royal pension for good and faithful service. The most famous of the Elizabethan translators, North published The Dial of Princes (1557) from Spanish writer Antonio de Guevara's Reloj de príncipes o libro aureo del emperador Marco Aurelio (The Dial of Princes or the Golden Book of Marcus Aurelius, 1529), an idealized biography of Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius; The Morall Philosophie of Doni (1570), from an Italian version of the fables of Bidpai; and Plutarch's Parallel Lives (1579), from the French version by Jacques Amyot. Although his writings were simply translations of translations, his stately prose profoundly influenced the style of his contemporaries and provided them with a vast amount of classical material. William Shakespeare, who took the plots of his Roman plays from Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, sometimes used North's very phrases.