Tear a cat

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.

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

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

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."