Most readers of Shakespeare will remember the word 'adage' from Lady Macbeth's taunting of her husband:
Art thou afeard
To be the same thing in thine own act and valor
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?
(Mac. 1.7.39-45)
The adage is glossed by the commentators as "The cat would eat fish, and would not wet her feet."
The only other occurrence of the word 'adage' in Shakespeare takes us to another spectacular scene of a woman taunting a man. In the first act of 3Henry VI, Queen Margaret has captured Richard, Duke of York, who has tried to usurp her husband's throne. The scene, which ends with the ritual execution of Richard, begins with a mock coronation, a rehearsal by Margaret of Richard's crimes, and a memorable description of his sons:
Where are your mess of sons to back you now,
Thy wanton Edward, and the lusty George?
And where's that valiant crook-back prodigy
Dicky, your boy, that with grumbling voice
Was wont to cheer his dad in mutinies.
(3H6 1.3.73-77)
Richard, now in the role of martyr, gives as good as he gets. He calls her "she-wolf of France," says that it is "ill-beseeming in thy sex / To triumph like an Amazonian trull," dwells at length on the poverty of her father, who despite his titles as King of Naples, "both the Sicils and Jerusalem," was not "so wealthy as an English yeoman" (1.3.111-123), and concludes that her performance is useless
Unless the adage must be verified,
That beggar mounted run their horse to death.
(1.3.126-127)
Eleven lines later we find the famous line
O tiger's heart wrapp'd in a woman's hide
(1.3.137)
So the two occurrences of 'adage' in Shakespeare share a cat and a demonically wicked woman taunting a man. 'Cat' is a fairly common word in Shakespeare: it occurs in 20 plays for a total of 41 occurrences. 'Tiger' occurs 30 times in 19 plays. That cats and adages should cross paths on the two occurrences of 'adage' is unlikely, and the probabilities for coincidence drop further if we consider the association of 'cat', 'tiger', and 'adage' with a wicked woman on a grand scale. So it appears that the three words establish a link between Margaret and Lady Macbeth, which is thematically plausible. But did Shakespeare think of a tiger as a large cat?
He did associate cats with lions and pards, as in Hotspur's reference to "a couching lion and a ramping cat" (1H4 3.1.151), in Ariel's definition of a leopard as a "cat o' mountain" (Tem.4.1.261), and in Oliver's description of the "catlike watch" of the lioness that nearly killed him (AYL 4.3.115).
18 September 1999