Lady Macbeth's "poor cat i' th' adage" is troubling John Murphy of the City of the Cats, as he calls Kilkenny. What is the adage the good lady was speaking about when she chides her husband for letting "I dare not" wait upon " would", he asks. She was alluding, John, to: "The cat loves fish but dares not wet his feet".
We'll stay with the Tudors. An old man who lives in my part of Co Wicklow was recently described by his daughter as "grumpy as a hare". Strange, isn't it, how the hares are considered to be out of sorts, except of course, when they go slightly mad in March and can be seen coupcarleying in the moonlight.
The notion that the hare is melancholy is a very old one. When Falstaff complains to the young prince that he is as melancholy as a gib cat, a lugg'd bear and the drone of a Lincolnshire bagpipe, the prince says: "What sayest thou to a hare, or the melancholy of Moorditch?"
Turberville, in his Book on Hunting and Falconry, was the first to attempt an explanation of the sprightly animal's disposition: "The hare first taught us the use of the hear be called Wylde Succory, which is very excellent for those which are disposed to melancholicke: shee herself is one of the most melancholicke beasts that is, and to heal her owne infirmitie shee goeth commonly to sit under the herbe."
Dr Johnson remarked: "A hare may be considered as melancholy because she is upon her form solitary: and according to the physic of the times, the flesh of it was supposed to generate melancholy". And when Lady Answerall, in Swift's Polite Conversation, was asked to eat hare, she refused, saying: "No, madam, they say `tis melancholy meat".
I think it's fairly well known that in some parts of Ireland - and in southern England too - a female infant is called a child. Hence the question: "Is it a boy or a child?" Here we have another Tudor relic. In The Winter's Tale the old shepherd says: "Mercy on's, a barne: a very pretty barne! a boy or a child, I wonder?"
And I wonder does Mr O Maonlai know that Hothouse Flowers was a Tudor euphemism for ladies who worked in houses of ill-repute? Steam baths were one of the amenities: so Ben Jonson tells us in Every Man Out Of His Humour.