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Thomas North

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For other uses, see Thomas North (disambiguation).

Sir
Thomas North
Born28 May 1535
London
Died1604 (aged 68–69)
London
NationalityEnglish
Alma materPeterhouse, Cambridge
Occupation(s)Justice of the Peace, author and translator
Known forTranslating Plutarch's Lives into English
Parent(s)Edward North, 1st Baron North, Alice Brockenden
RelativesRoger North, 2nd Baron North (brother); Alice Arden in Arden of Faversham (half-sister); Elizabeth North (daughter); Christina North, Mary North (sisters)

Sir Thomas North (28 May 1535 – c. 1604) was an English 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 and well-educated, but unlike his elder brother, he inherited nothing and had to forge his own path through literary work. He traveled to Italy, France, and Ireland and earned acclaim for his translations. Connected to Queen Elizabeth I’s court, he maintained a long literary career but faced financial difficulties later in life. Being 29 years older than Shakespeare, he likely sold his plays.[1]

Life

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Thomas North was born between 9 and 10 o'clock at night on Friday, 28 May 1535, in the parish of St Alban, Wood Street, in the City of London. He was the second son of the Edward North, 1st Baron North.[2]

He is supposed to have been a student of Peterhouse, Cambridge,[3][4] and was entered at Lincoln's Inn in 1557. 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.[5]

In 1574, he 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 Armada, and was knighted in France in October of 1591 by the Earl of Essex, just before the Siege of Rouen. He returned again to help quell Tyrone's Rebellion in Ireland in 1596.[6]

His daughter, Elizabeth North, was posited as the inspiration for the character Rosalinde in Edmund Spenser's The Shepheardes Calendar by Percy Long in 1905. This identification was based on the commonalities between the poem's "Rosalinde", and North's daughter who lived with her powerful uncle, Roger North, 2nd Baron North, at his estates of Kirtling Tower. Rosalind(e) was, on this theory, an anagram for Elisa Nord: Elisa being a shorted version of Elizabeth, and Nord being French for North.[7]

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,[8] and received a small pension (£40 a year) from Queen Elizabeth that same year.[3]

Translations

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Guevara

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His first translation, of Guevara's Reloj de Principes (commonly known as Libro áureo), was published in 1557. It is a compendium of moral counsels chiefly compiled from the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, 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.[3]

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.[3]

Linguistic evidence suggests thatThe 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.[9] Phrases from North's Dial of Princes may also appear in Shakespeare’s Hamlet.[10]

Eastern fables

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His next work was The Morall Philosophie of Doni (1570), a translation of an Italian language version of originally Indian fables,[3] popularly known as The Fables of Bidpai which had come to Europe primarily through Arabic translations.

Plutarch's Lives

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North published his translation of Plutarch in 1580, basing it on the French version by Jacques Amyot. The first edition was dedicated to Queen Elizabeth, and was followed by another edition in 1595, containing fresh Lives. A third edition of his Plutarch was published, in 1603, with more translated Parallel Lives, and a supplement of other translated biographies.[3]

North's Plutarch was reprinted for the Tudor Translations (1895), with an introduction by George Wyndham.[3]

According to the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, "[i]t 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".[3]

Shakespeare and North

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The Lives translation formed the source from which Shakespeare drew the materials for his Julius Caesar, Coriolanus, Timon of Athens, and Antony and Cleopatra. It is in the last-named play that he follows the Lives most closely, whole speeches being taken directly from North.[3] This has produced a theory that some Shakespeare plays are adaptations of plays originally written by Thomas North.[11][12][13]

Notes

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  1. ^ "Shaking up Shakespeare". lafayette.edu. 20 July 2021.
  2. ^ Allen, P. S. (1922). "The Birth of Thomas North". English Historical Review. 37 (148): 565–566. doi:10.1093/ehr/xxxvii.cxlviii.565. ISSN 0013-8266.
  3. ^ a b c d e f g h i Chisholm 1911, p. 759.
  4. ^ "North, Thomas (NRT555T)". A Cambridge Alumni Database. University of Cambridge.
  5. ^ McCarthy, Dennis; Schlueter, June (2021). Thomas North's 1555 Travel Journal: From Italy to Shakespeare (1st ed.). Vancouver: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. pp. 11–22. ISBN 978-1683933052.
  6. ^ Davis, Harold H. (May 1949). "The Military Career of Thomas North". Huntington Library Quarterly. 12 (3): 315–321. doi:10.2307/3816099. ISSN 0018-7895. JSTOR 3816099.
  7. ^ Long, Percy (1908). Spenser’s Rosalind. In honour of a private personage unknowne (PDF). Anglia: Zeitschrift für englische Philologie. p. 72–104.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: publisher location (link)
  8. ^ Acts of the Privy Council, 1600-1601. p. 238.
  9. ^ Schlueter, J. (2014). "A Shakespeare/North Collaboration: Titus Andronicus and Titus and Vespasian". Cambridge University Press: 85–101.
  10. ^ "Did Shakespeare Have a secret source?" (PDF). Bostonglobe.com. 21 March 2021.
  11. ^ Blanding, Michael (2021). North by Shakespeare: A Rogue Scholar’s Quest for the Truth Behind the Bard’s Work (PDF). Hachette. p. timeline. ISBN 978-0316493246. Retrieved 23 April 2025.
  12. ^ "Plagiarism Software Unveils a New Source for 11 of Shakespeare's Plays". nytimes.com. 7 February 2018.
  13. ^ "Did Shakespeare Base His Masterpieces on Works by an Obscure Elizabethan Playwright". smithsonianmag.com. 6 April 2021.

References

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Further reading

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