Birthday Bard
Friday, 26 April 2024 08:10
William Shakespeare was born 23 April 1564 and very poetically died on the same date 52 years later. You couldn’t make it up, although he could, as it is very much like a tortuous subplot for the minor comedy characters in a lost play. I am thinking ‘Whatever Fits the Bill’ in which royal Bohemian triplets Pusica, Kotka and Machiatko separated at birth, raised by poor but honest woodcutters/shepherds/charcoal burners, are lured into an enchanted forest where they discover that they have identical birthmarks in the shape of a catspaw...you know how these things go.
Belvedere has just come in to inform me that actually nobody knows exactly when Shakespeare was born. We do know he was baptised on 26 April, and that the custom then was to baptise babies three days after birth, so a rational guess would be 23 April, but it is unverifiable.
As you can see, Belvedere does not possess a poetic licence.
We know hardly anything about Shakespeare’s life, although we do know he did so well with the playwrighting thing that he eventually had the best house in Stratford. It’s impossible to know whether or not he had a cat, or had any feline longings in him, although it’s inconceivable that the Shakespeare household did not employ a Small Rodent Control Operative, probably called Tybalt or Mistress Mousebane.
So cats were not really Will’s thing. There are no sonnets to their shimmering whiskers; no comparison of their dappled fur to the silken cloths of heaven; not a mention of the darling catkins of May.
However, all is not lost. He did use their observed behaviours as metaphors, similes and imagery. On the eve of the battle of Agincourt, Henry V gives his army what is still the best-ever pre-match pep talk. The battleground is a quagmire after two days of torrential rain, and the English army is outnumbered by five to one. What does Henry exhort his men to do?
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger;
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favour'd rage;
Then lend the eye a terrible aspect.
In Romeo and Juliet (Act 3, Scene 1, the fightbetween the Montague massive and the Capulet crew, is full of cat imagery; young agile men leaping and pouncing and posturing like young tomcats. Cool but doomed Mercutio calls outTybalt as a rat catcher and ‘the prince of cats’- hard to believe that’s an insult, but it was - and finishes with this killer:
‘Good king of cats, nothing but one of your nine lives, that I mean to make bold withal, and, as you shall use me hereafter, dry beat the rest of the eight.’
Spoiler: Rapier wit gets him nowhere. Tybalt kills Mercutio then Romeo kills Tybalt. The rest you know.
Cats are big in the Scottish play (Macbeth).The witches of course, obvious cat refs, but here is Lady Macbeth’s emasculating comparison of her husband’s pusillanimous (make your own pun) behaviour as he has a wobble about murdering the king..
Art thou afear’d
To be the same in thine own act and valour
As thou art in desire? Wouldst thou have that
Which thou esteem'st the ornament of life,
And live a coward in thine own esteem,
Letting 'I dare not' wait upon 'I would',
Like the poor cat i’th' adage?
The poor cat i’ th’ adage is the proverbial cat who wants a fish dinner but is afraid of getting her feet wet.
There are a few more, mostly pejorative, so I am not going cite them, but it’s not much of a haul over 37 plays is it? Shakespeare does score one solid cat point - his is the first recorded incident of the word purr, in Act 5, Scene 2 of All’s Well that Ends Well. Warning: hold your nose.
Enter Lafew.
Look, here he comes himself.—Here is a purr of
Fortune’s, sir, or of Fortune’s cat—but not a
musk-cat—that has fall’n into the unclean fishpond
of her displeasure and, as he says, is muddied
withal.
Happy Birthday Shakespeare (despite the lack of cats.)
For more about cats and literature see