“sometime he angers me
With telling me of the moldwarp and the ant.”
Mouse. This word was formerly used as a term of endearment, from either sex to the other. In this sense it is used by Rosaline in “Love’s Labour’s Lost” (v. 2):
“What’s your dark meaning, mouse, of this light word?”
and again in “Hamlet” (iii. 4).
Some doubt exists as to the exact meaning of “Mouse-hunt,” by Lady Capulet, in “Romeo and Juliet” (iv. 4):
“Ay, you have been a mouse-hunt in your time,
But I will watch you from such watching now.”
According to some, the expression implies “a hunter of gay women,” mouse having been used in this signification.[439] Others are of opinion that the stoat[440] is meant, the smallest of the weasel tribe, and others again the polecat. Mr. Staunton[441] tells us that the mouse-hunt is the marten, an animal of the weasel tribe which prowls about for its prey at night, and is applied to any one of rakish propensities.
Holinshed, in his “History of Scotland” (1577, p. 181), quotes from the laws of Kenneth II., King of Scotland: “If a sowe eate her pigges, let hyr be stoned to death and buried, that no man eate of hyr fleshe.” This offence is probably alluded to by Shakespeare in “Macbeth” (iv. 1), where the witch says:
“Pour in sow’s blood, that hath eaten
Her nine farrow.”
Polecat, or Fitchew. This animal is supposed to be very amorous; and hence its name, Mr. Steevens says, was often applied to ladies of easy or no virtue. In “Othello” (iv. 1) Cassio calls Bianca a “fitchew,” and in “Troilus and Cressida” (v. 1) Thersites alludes to it.[442]