"A dog, a rat,... a cat to scratch a man to death!": Olivier's "Richard III" and Popular Cultures

CATESBY:

Dispatch, my lord: the duke would be at dinner.

Make a short shrift, he longs to see your head.

(Hastings, regarding in great bitterness Catesby, Ratcliffe, and Lovell in turn, pronounces the following lines of contemporary doggerel)  

HASTINGS:

The Cat, the Rat, and Lovell the dog

Rule all England under the Hog.

RATCLIFFE:

Come, come, dispatch.

LOVELL:

Tis bootless to exclaim.  (Olivier and Dent)

So Lord Hastings goes to his death in Laurence Olivier's iconic 1955 film Richard III, connecting a Technicolor fantasy London to legendary apocrypha. Hastings's lines of doggerel are (unsurprisingly) extra-textual additions to Shakespeare's play. As the stage directions above suggest, the two-line insult incorporating the names of the king's closest advisors and the heraldic badge of the king himself was contemporary to the historical Richard III. The fate of the poem's author, William Collingbourne, is well documented, and is often held up to demonstrate the cruelty of Richard Gloucester. "Abbreviated shorter by the head and [...] divided into four quarters" (Holinshed 422) for "making a foolishe rime" (Campbell 347), Collingbourne's additional crime of conspiring to fund an invasion attempt by the future Henry VII is mentioned by Holinshed but often overlooked by history (Potter 148-49).