Thomas Norton - Literature

Literature

From his eighteenth year Norton had begun to compose verse. We find him connected with Jasper Heywood; as a writer of "sonnets" he contributed to Tottel's Miscellany, and in 1560 he composed, in company with Sackville, the earliest English tragedy, Gorboduc, which was performed before Elizabeth I in the Inner Temple on 18 January 1561.

Gorboduc was revised into a superior form, as The Tragedy of Ferrex and Porrex, in 1570. Norton's early lyrics have in the main disappeared. The most interesting of his numerous anti-Catholic pamphlets are those on the rebellion of Northumberland and on the projected marriage of Mary, Queen of Scots, to the Duke of Norfolk. Norton also translated Calvin's Institutes (1561) and Alexander Nowell's Catechism (1570).

Gorboduc appears in various dramatic collections, and was separately edited by W.D. Cooper (Shakespeare Society, 1847), and by Miss Toulmin Smith in Volkmoller's Englische Sprache-und Literatur-denkmale (1883). The best account of Norton, and his place in literary history, is that of Sidney Lee in his Dictionary of National Biography.