Last week during a rehearsal break I was sitting on a stoop with an excellent redheaded actor. I have a preoccupation with the wide-ranging mythos surrounding redheadedness, and at some point I’d like to write a part for him. When I brought this up, he responded with, “Write me a part to tear a cat in.” And I said, “Tear a cat? Jesus, that’s awful.”
Turns out he was ripping off Shakespeare, specifically Bottom in Midsummer Night’s Dream: “Yet my chief humour is for a tyrant : I could play Ercles rarely, or a part to tear a cat in, to make all split.” Bottom and the redheaded actor are saying they want a role in which to get up there and rant and rave.
That’s how countless online dictionaries define the phrase “tear a cat” (including, strangely, the Online Medical Dictionary): “to rant violently; to rave; — especially applied to theatrical ranting”. But I loved this horrendous image so much that I did a little research. Because, in addition to redheadedness, I have a preoccupation with reading readings of Shakespeare. For each line he wrote there are a wealth of branching assertions telling us What He Really Meant, and the range of possible origins sometimes makes a collage of superimposed images on one tiny, ancient phrase, laid down in layers by hoary old scholars from a constellation of moments in time.
Here, for example, are some tearings of cats, from “A Midsummer-night’s Dream, By William Shakespeare”, ed. Henry Cuningham, Harold F. Brooks, Published by Methuen, 1905:
“Tear a cat: Apparently a proverbial phrase for tearing a passion to tatters (Hamlet, III. ii. 10). Edwards, Canons of Criticism, 1765, p. 52, thinks this a burlesque upon Hercules’s killing a lion.
Heath, Revisal of Shakespeare’s Text, 1765, p. 45, takes Warburton’s emendation, “cap,” seriously, and supposes “it might not be unusual for a player, in the violence of his rant, sometimes to tear his cap.”
Capell takes Bottom seriously, and supposes ‘he might have seen ‘Ercles’ [Heracles] acted, and some strange thing torn, which he mistook for a cat.'”
Cunningham and Brooks are relatively concise and journalistic in their coverage of the possibilities. But these literary detectives can sometimes get pretty snarky in their defense of their ideas. Reading old annotated Shakespeare volumes is like reading two plays at once, one of which is contained wholly in nine-point font at the bottom of the page. Here’s an older and more ornery slew of “origins” From “Shakspeare’s Himself Again: Or, The Language of the Poet Asserted: Being a Full But Dispassionate Examen of the Readings and Interpretations of the Several Editors”, by Andrew Becket, published by A. J. Valpy, 1815. Becket writes:
“‘In the old comedy of the Roaring Girl, 1611, there is a character called Tear-cat, who says : ‘I am called, by those who have seen my valour, Tear-cat…’
…In an anonymous piece called Histriomastix, or The P’layer Whipt, 1610, in six acts, a parcel of soldiers drag a company of players on the stage, and the captain says : “Sirrah, this is you that would rend and tear a cat upon a stage,” &c.
Again, in The Isle of Culis, a comedy by J. Day, 1606: ‘I had rather near two such jests, than a whole play of such Tear-cat thunderclaps.'”
And this is where Becket heats up:
“The sense is wholly mistaken by the editors. It is not the domestic animal the cat, which is spoken of. For what can possibly be understood of “a part to tear a cat in?” We must read: “a part to tear: a catin.” ” To tear,” is to rant, to bluster. Catin is a french word signifying a drab, a low, vulgar woman. ‘A’ is the french particle which has the power of the adverb ‘like’. The whole will run thus: ‘My chief humor is for a tyrant. I could play Ercles rarely, or a part in which I might rant and bluster like a very drab, a common roarer.’ Hamlet, we may remember, says;
‘Must I unpack my heart with words,
And fall a railing like a very drab.’
In the quotations in which tear cat appears, it should be noted that ‘cat’ is contracted of ‘catin’. Thus, in the Comedy of the Roaring Girl, Tear-cat (roaring woman) [is] the name of a character of the play. It must not be objected that Tear-cat is, in some of the pieces, a male character. A man may be said to rant or rail like a drab, a common woman– and we have an example of it in the lines from Hamlet.”
OK, sure, catin is a possibility, I guess– although it seems pretty far-fetched to me (not to mention vaguely sexist). As much as I enjoy hearing these guys tear a cat, here’s my read of their reads of the bard: in these passionate attempts to pin down “what can possibly be understood” in these lines, the power and violence and immediacy of the tearing of a cat is lost. Why does a cat have to become a cap or a roll of thunder or “some strange thing torn”? Why can’t the strange thing torn be a cat? Can Shakespeare not be trusted to be wildly imaginative? We can add colons or remove spaces or rewrite the whole damn line to suit our hunger for literal sense, but what happens to the unpredictable poetry, the surprise, the flash of a weird and arresting picture exploding from the page? There is value in the attempt to read literature in the dialect of its own era; but there is a weird beauty in the friction between words whose meanings have shifted over time. I would prefer to preserve the poetry, and to sometimes be confused and wrong. I would prefer to allow my mind’s eye to see the cat torn. We’re talking about theater here; and as Bottom and Shakespeare and even the redheaded actor well know, anything– absolutely anything– can happen on a stage.