tear a cat

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English

Verb

tear a cat (third-person singular simple present tears a cat, present participle tearing a cat, simple past tore a cat, past participle torn a cat)

  1. (obsolete, idiomatic, acting) To overact; to violently rant and rave on stage.
    • c. 1595–1596, William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream, act 1, scene 2:
      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.
    • c. 1599, John Marston, Histriomastix‎, act 5, scene 1, page :
      Sirha is this you would rend and teare the Cat / Upon a Stage, and now march like drown'd rat?
    • 1835, George Daniel, “The Conversazione”, in The Modern Dunciad, William Pickering, page 224:
      Till, in his periwig combustion / Will. Shakespeare sounds like Irish fustian, / In which Macready tears a cat, / And Shiel, the patriot, writes so pat;
    • 1970, Alfred Rossi, Minneapolis Rehearsals: Tyrone Guthrie Directs Hamlet, University of California Press, →ISBN, page 21:
      From this performance there is no doubt in anyone's mind that Hamlet is an amateur actor having a fling at histrionics, or as Guthrie might say, "tearing a cat."

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