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6 unusual facts about Thomas North


Jacques Amyot

His vigorous and idiomatic version of Plutarch, Vies des hommes illustres, was translated into English by Sir Thomas North, and supplied Shakespeare with materials for his Roman plays.

The Tortoise and the Birds

An Italian version of Bidpai's fables was early translated into English by Thomas North under the title of The Morall Philosophie of Doni (1570).

Thomas North

His next work was The Morall Philosophie of Doni (1570), a translation of an Italian collection of eastern fables, popularly known as The Fables of Bidpai.

He translated, in 1557, Guevara's Reloj de Principes (commonly known as Libro áureo), a compendium of moral counsels chiefly compiled from the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, under the title of Diall of Princes.

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

North's version, with its mannerisms and its constant use of antithesis, set the fashion which was to culminate in John Lyly's Euphues.


The Birth of Merlin

The common passages appear to be best explained as the type of borrowings sometimes found in works of the era (the borrowings from Thomas North's translation of Plutarch's Parallel Lives in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, for example) that have no bearing on questions of authorship.


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