“Rhyme them to death, as they do Irish rats,
In drumming tunes”

Ben Jonson ‘Poetaster’ (first performed 1601)

“I was never so be-rhymed since Pythagoras’ time, that I was an Irish rat, which I can hardly remember.”

Shakespeare ‘As you like it’ (first performed 1603)

“There are people still in the west of the county of Clare who pretend to possess a form of satire for the banishment of rats. One man, Thomas Keane, land surveyor, now living near Kilkee, told me, about the year 1820, that he had thus banished one or more destructive rats from his mill and house at Belahaglass, near Dunlicky Castle, on the Kilkee coast. It must be remembered, that the rat satire was always composed in rhyme, and in the most obscure and occult phraseology of the Irish language…”

J. H. Todd and Eugene Curry ‘On Rhyming Rats to Death’ in: ‘Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy (1836-1869)’