"'Tis infamy to serve a hag, Cats are thought imps, her broom a nag; And boys against our lives combine, Because 'tis said, your cats have nine."
[383] See Brand's "Pop. Antiq.," vol. iii. p. 42.
"Why then, thou hast nine lives like a cat."
And in Dekker's "Strange Horse-Race" (1613): "When the grand Helcat had gotten these two furies with nine lives." This notion, it may be noted, is quite the reverse of the well-known saying, "Care will kill a cat," mentioned in "Much Ado About Nothing" (v. 1), where Claudio says: "What though care killed a cat."
For some undiscovered reason a cat was formerly called Tybert or Tybalt;[384] hence some of the insulting remarks of Mercutio, in "Romeo and Juliet" (iii. 1), who calls Tybalt "rat-catcher" and "king of cats." In the old romance of "Hystorye of Reynard the Foxe" (chap. vi.), we are told how "the king called for Sir Tibert, the cat, and said to him, Sir Tibert, you shall go to Reynard, and summon him the second time."[385] A popular term for a wild cat was "cat-o'-mountain," an expression[386] borrowed from the Spaniards, who call the wild cat "gato-montes." In the "Merry Wives of Windsor" (ii. 2), Falstaff says of Pistol, "Your cat-a-mountain looks."
[384] Dyce's "Glossary to Shakespeare," p. 466.
[385] From Tibert, Tib was also a common name for a cat.
[386] Douce's "Illustrations of Shakespeare," 1839, p. 41.
The word cat was used as a term of contempt, as in "The Tempest" (ii. 1) and "A Midsummer-Night's Dream" (iii. 2), where Lysander says, "Hang off, thou cat." Once more, too, in "Coriolanus" (iv. 2), we find it in the same sense:
"'Twas you incensed the rabble; Cats, that can judge as fitly of his worth, As I can of those mysteries which heaven Will not have earth to know."
A gib, or a gib cat, is an old male cat[387]--gib being the contraction of Gilbert,[388] and is, says Nares, an expression exactly analogous to that of jackass.[389] Tom-cat is now the usual term. The word was certainly not bestowed upon a cat early in life, as is evident from the melancholy character ascribed to it in Shakespeare's allusion in "1 Henry IV." (i. 2): "I am as melancholy as a gib cat." Ray gives "as melancholy as a gib'd [a corruption of gib] cat." The term occurs again in "Hamlet" (iii. 4). It is improperly applied to a female by Beaumont and Fletcher, in the "Scornful Lady" (v. 1): "Bring out the cat-hounds! I'll make you take a tree, whore; then with my tiller bring down your gib-ship, and then have you cased and hung up in the warren."