tear a cat

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, acting) To overact; to violently rant and rave on stage.
   • c. 1595–1596, Shakespeare, William, 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, Marston, John, Histriomastix‎, Act 5, Scene 1, page [53]:

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

   • 1835, Daniel, George, “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, Rossi, Alfred, Minneapolis Rehearsals: Tyrone Guthrie Directs Hamlet, University of California Press, 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."

• chew the scenery, ham, ham it up, melodramatize, overact

• tear-cat