North, Sir Thomas

Related Category: English Literature, 1500 to 1799: Biographies

1535?–1601?, English translator. He is famous for his translation of Plutarch, entitled Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (1579), which he made from the French of Jacques Amyot. This work, ornate but vivid, was a source for many of Shakespeare's plays, among them Antony and Cleopatra and Julius Caesar, and was a major influence in the development of Elizabethan prose.