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SIR THOMAS NORTH (1535?-16o1?)

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Originally appearing in Volume V19, Page 760 of the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.
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SIR THOMAS NORTH (1535?-16o1?)  ,
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English translator of Plutarch, second son of the 1st Baron North, was born about 1535 . He is supposed to have been a student of Peterhouse, .Cambridge, and was entered at Lincoln's
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Inn in 1557 . In 1574 he accompanied his
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brother, Lord North, on a visit to the French court . He served as captain in the
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year of the
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Armada, and was knighted about three years later . His name is on the roll of justices of the peace for Cambridge in 1592 and again in 1597, and he received a small pension (l4o a year) from the queen in 16o, . A third edition of his Plutarch was published, in 1603, with a supplement of other translated
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biographies . He translated, in 1557, Guevara's Reloj de Principes (commonly known as Libro Aureo), a compendium of moral counsels chiefly compiled from the Meditations of
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Marcus Aurelius, under the title of Diall of Princes . The English of this
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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
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Continental travels and studies . North translated from a French copy of Guevara, but seems to have been well acquainted with the
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Spanish version . The
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book had already been translated by Lord Berners, but without reproducing the rhetorical artifices of the
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original . North's version, with its mannerisms and its constant use of antithesis, set the fashion which was to culminate in Lyly's Euphues . His next work was The Morall Philosophie of Doni (1570), a
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translation of an
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Italian collection of eastern fables .

The first edition of his translation of Plutarch, from the French of Jacques

Amyot, appeared in 1579 . The first edition was dedicated to Queen Elizabeth, and was followed by other
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editions in 1595 and 1603, containing in each case fresh Lives . It is almost impossible to over-estimate the influence of North's vigorous English on contemporary writers, and some critics have called him the first master of English
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prose . The book formed the source from which Shakespeare drew the materials for his
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Julius Caesar, Coriolanus and Antony and
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Cleopatra . It is in the last-named
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play that he follows the Lives most closely, whole speeches being taken
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direct from North . North's Plutarch was reprinted for the " Tudor
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Translations " (1895), with an introduction by George Wyndham .

End of Article: SIR THOMAS NORTH (1535?-16o1?)
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