Thomas North

• 1. Introduction

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  Thomas North was born between nine and ten o'clock at night on the 28th of May 1535, in the parish of St Alban, Wood Street, in the City of London. The hour is oddly specific for a man whose work would quietly reshape English literature. North never wrote a play. He never shared a stage with actors or argued over costume budgets. Yet the words William Shakespeare put into the mouths of Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra were, in crucial stretches, lifted almost directly from North's pen. How does a translator, lawyer, and soldier become the silent co-author of some of the most performed plays in history? And what do we make of a man who spent four decades writing and fighting, yet likely died in financial difficulty, having inherited little from his father, Edward North, the 1st Baron North?

• 2. The Making of a Renaissance Man

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  Peterhouse, Cambridge is where North likely received his formal education, though his life refused to stay within academic walls. In 1555, during the reign of the Catholic Queen Mary, he joined a diplomatic embassy travelling to Rome. The party included Thomas Thirlby, Bishop of Ely, Anthony Browne, Sir Edward Carne, and Viscount Montague. Their purpose was to reconcile England with the Pope after the rupture of the Reformation. North kept a journal of the journey, a detail that speaks to his instinct for recording what he witnessed. By 1557 he had returned to London and become Master of the Revels at Lincoln's Inn, a role concerned with organising entertainment and ceremony at one of the great legal institutions. That same year, the poet Jasper Heywood singled North out in his translation of Seneca's Thyestes, praising his "stately style" and "goodly grace" and listing him alongside Thomas Sackville, 1st Earl of Dorset, and Christopher Yelverton as writers of note at the Inns of Court. North may also have written plays for Leicester's Men, and his brother Roger's accounts include a payment suggesting North staged a production with that troupe at court in 1580.

• 3. A Soldier Among Words

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  In 1574, North accompanied his brother Roger, 2nd Lord North, on a diplomatic mission to the French court in Lyon. Military service followed steadily. He captained a band of footmen in Ireland in 1580, then fought alongside the Earl of Leicester in the Low Countries in 1587. When the Spanish Armada threatened England, he was appointed to defend the Isle of Ely. In October 1591, the Earl of Essex knighted North in France, just before the Siege of Rouen. He returned to Ireland in 1596 to help suppress Tyrone's Rebellion. His name appears on the justice of the peace rolls for Cambridge in both 1592 and 1597. When Essex's Rebellion was put down in 1601, North received a reward of twenty-five pounds. Queen Elizabeth granted him a small pension of forty pounds a year that same year. The pattern that emerges is of a man perpetually near the action of Elizabethan political life but never at its centre, rewarded modestly and intermittently for decades of loyal service.

• 4. The Diall of Princes

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  North's first published translation appeared in 1557, the same year he joined the Rome embassy. It was Guevara's Reloj de Principes, commonly known as the Libro aureo, and North published it under the title Diall of Princes. The book is a compendium of moral counsels drawn largely from the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. North worked from a French copy of Guevara's text rather than the Spanish original, though he appears to have known the Spanish version well. What made the translation notable was its style. John Bourchier, 2nd Baron Berners, had translated Marcus Aurelius before, but without capturing the rhetorical devices that gave the original its texture. North's version, with its constant use of antithesis and its ornate rhythms, became a model for a generation of educated English readers hungry for the elaborate Continental style they had encountered on their travels. That fashion would eventually culminate in John Lyly's Euphues. Linguistic evidence suggests that The Dial of Princes may have supplied passages to Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus. Biographical and historical parallels have also led scholars to suggest that North may have written the now-lost play Titus and Vespasian in 1562, which some believe Shakespeare later used as a source. Phrases from the Dial may also appear in Hamlet.

• 5. Plutarch and Shakespeare

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  North published his translation of Plutarch's Parallel Lives in 1580, working not from the original Greek but from the French version by Jacques Amyot. The first edition was dedicated to Queen Elizabeth. A second edition followed in 1595. A third appeared in 1603, expanded with additional Parallel Lives and a supplement of other translated biographies. From this translation, Shakespeare drew the material for Julius Caesar, Coriolanus, Timon of Athens, and Antony and Cleopatra. The debt runs deepest in Antony and Cleopatra, where whole speeches pass from North's prose into Shakespeare's verse with only minor changes. The Encyclopaedia Britannica's Eleventh Edition declared that "it is almost impossible to overestimate the influence of North's vigorous English on contemporary writers", and called him by some critics' measure the first master of English prose. North's Plutarch was reprinted for the Tudor Translations series in 1895, with an introduction by George Wyndham, more than two hundred years after North's death.

• 6. The Question of Authorship

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  Recent scholarship has pushed the boundaries of what North's influence might mean. Some researchers have hypothesised that all of his published translations may have shaped the broader Shakespearean theatrical canon, not merely the Roman plays. The conjecture goes further: North may have known Shakespeare personally. If the hypothesis holds, the relationship between the two men was not simply that of source and borrower but something more collaborative or competitive. North's daughter Elizabeth has drawn scholarly attention of a different kind. Percy Long argued in 1905 that Elizabeth North was the real-world inspiration for the character "Rosalinde" in Edmund Spenser's The Shepheardes Calender. The identification rests on the fact that Spenser himself admitted "Rosalinde" was an anagram. Long resolved it to "Elisa Nord": Elisa as a shortened form of Elizabeth, Nord as French for North. Elizabeth lived at the time with her uncle Roger North, 2nd Baron North, at his estate of Kirtling Tower. The possibility that North's daughter inspired a character in one of the period's significant pastoral poems adds one more thread to the web of connections between the North family and the great literary names of Elizabethan England.