Timon, Sir Thomas North and the Loup-Garou
2015; Oxford University Press; Volume: 62; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/notesj/gjv131
ISSN1471-6941
Autores Tópico(s)Historical and Literary Analyses
ResumoIN North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romanes , there is a curious reference to Timon in the ‘Life of Alcibiades’. As Alcibiades returns home one day, he is stopped by a figure described as ‘Timon, surnamed Misanthropus (as who would saye, Loup-garou , or the manhater)’. 1 The qualifications of both ‘Misanthropus’ and ‘manhater’ to gloss Timon’s personality are understandable, but the invocation of a loup-garou —a ‘werewolf’ or ‘wolf-man’—is more puzzling. John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi contains perhaps the most famous example in early modern literature of a character that undergoes a lycanthropic transformation, but Timon is, on the surface at least, a rather different figure to Ferdinand. And why, in an English translation of Plutarch’s text, does this term appear in French? The association of Timon with the loup-garou first appears in Jacques Amyot’s Les Vies de Plutarque , the direct source of North’s own translation. 2 It is not in Plutarch’s original Greek. 3 However, understanding the significance of Amyot’s addition requires further explanation. A New Dictionary French and English lists two entries under ‘loup-garou’, the first of which is the more familiar to a modern reader as ‘a mankind Wolf, a Wolf that once being flesht on men and children will rather starve than feed on any thing else’. 4 However, the second entry describes the loup-garou as ‘one that possessed with an extream and strange melancholy believes he is turned Wolf, and behaves himself as a Wolf’. 5 It is this second sense of loup-garou that Amyot invokes, having more bearing on the Timon legend.
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