tear a cat

present singular third person tears a cat · participle present tearing a cat · past tore a cat · participle past torn a cat

1. idiomaticobsoleteactingTo overact; to violently rant and rave on stage.

   Sirha is this you would rend and teare the Cat / Upon a Stage, and now march like drown'd rat?

   c. 1599, John Marston, Histriomastix, act 5, scene 1, page [53]

   3 more examples

   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. 1595–1596, William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream, act 1, scene 2

   Till, in his periwig combustion / Will. Shakespeare sounds like Irish fustian, / In which Macready tears a cat, / And Shiel, the patriot, writes so pat;

   1835, George Daniel, “The Conversazione”, in The Modern Dunciad, William Pickering, page 224

   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."

   1970, Alfred Rossi, Minneapolis Rehearsals: Tyrone Guthrie Directs Hamlet, University of California Press, →ISBN, page 21

   Synonyms: chew the scenery, ham, ham it up, melodramatize, overact