Background
Thomas North was born in 1535 and was the second son of the Edward North, 1st Baron N.
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Thomas North
Edit ProfileEducation
He is supposed to have been a student of Peterhouse, Cambridge, and was entered at Lincoln's Inn in 1557.
Career
He 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, he published The Diall of Princes (1557) from Antonio de Guevara's Libro Aureo, an adaptation of Marcus Aurelius; The Morall Philosophie of Doni (1570), from an Italian version of the fables of Bidpai; and Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (1579), from the French version by Jacques Amyot. Though he merely made translations of translations, his stately prose profoundly influenced the style of his contemporaries and provided them with a mine of Classical material. Shakespeare, who took the plots of his Roman plays from the Lives, sometimes borrowed North's very phrases.
