Shakespeare's Cats: Nine Lives in the Bard's Imagination

Across Shakespeare's 37 plays and 154 sonnets, the words 'cat' and 'kitten' appear more than twenty times. In King Lear, the broken king tells his treacherous daughter, 'I will not be a tame cat any longer.' In The Tempest, Prospero threatens Ariel with being chased 'like a kitten by a dog'. Cats in Shakespeare stand for betrayal and mystery — but also for tenderness and mischief. He never wrote a play solely about a cat, yet their spirit haunts nearly every great tragedy and comedy. In sixteenth-century England, the cat carried a far richer symbolism than it does today — both witch's companion and bringer of household luck. Shakespeare's ambivalence toward cats mirrors the ambivalence of his human characters.